Client Success Story: St. John’s Episcopal Church
St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ellicott City, Maryland, is a historic church community on a large campus that serves a broad, diverse community. The church has several buildings from which they are holding various virtual services each week during COVID. When they needed an upgrade to their system, they knew to look for church audio video companies who could work with their unique situation.
Church Audio Video Companies & Historical Buildings
Historic buildings come with challenges for assembling a straightforward, top-quality A/V system. Church audio video companies must consider the building’s architecture, especially for congregations who want their A/V systems to be discreet. St. John’s has a traditional service in its historic building. They also host a contemporary service in another. These services come with different needs, particularly when services are taking place virtually.
St. John’s needed a streaming upgrade to the existing system Audio-Video Group did ten years ago. St. John’s solicited proposals from multiple vendors. And Audio-Video Group was selected by the church to update the streaming, recording, and audio systems due to our creative and collaborative approach with the church and their highly technical volunteer team.
We installed three fixed pan, tilt, zoom cameras, and one wireless camera solution to move around the historic building on a tripod. We also installed a digital mixing console to control the audio for in-person and streaming audio simultaneously.
Creating an Immersive & Engaging A/V Experience
The new digital mixing console and stage box was a solution to improve the audio quality for the sanctuary and the stream. This equipment gives the worship team the flexibility to plug in additional audio inputs at the church building’s chancel area and much greater control and mixing capabilities for internet streaming. Their upgrade includes ambient congregational microphones. And two choir, organ, and congregational response microphones. The integration of these microphones enables parishioners and clergy a heightened ability to pick up what’s going on in the service. Additionally, this gives the worshippers a more immersive and engaging experience. Audio-Video Group is an authorized dealer of HSA desks, enabling the installation of two custom equipment desks for operators at the rear of the church.
First-Hand Volunteer A/V Experience
Audio-Video Group also prides itself on its deep understanding of volunteer-run systems. Many of our team members regularly operate A/V systems as volunteers at their own home congregations. We design all of our audio-video designs with volunteers at the center of operation. St. John’s entire operator team consists of volunteers, so ease of use is a priority. An essential requirement of this project was installing a straightforward and intuitive control system that, when necessary, can be efficiently run by one person. For a straightforward service, one person can run the entire audio, video, and streaming system and perform the service.
With their upgraded A/V system, St. John’s Episcopal Church is now able to stream their traditional, contemporary, and Korean-language services live to their parishioners. Streaming services allow the church to continue to build its presence online. Streaming also helps to keep its community together and growing during the pandemic. Audio-Video Group is proud to be part of their story.
We look forward to watching this unique congregation continue to grow. Are you looking for ways to evolve your A/V system to enable in-person and virtual worship services?
