House of God has provided AV and production services to churches across the country, including Influence Church and their associated faith-based record label Influence Music. “That’s been an ongoing project,” said Lusignan. “We’ve been working with them for around six years.”
For the past three years, the team has also been working with the multifaceted Christian organization, Jesus Culture – which consists of a Christian record label, two churches in California, a school of leadership, and a web video and podcast network. “We help produce, record, and track their albums,” explained Lusignan. “We also manage the installation and consulting projects at all of the campuses. That can sometimes mean putting in new lights, or an LED wall, or new speakers, or a recording setup.”
House of God recently upgraded Jesus Culture’s two campuses to Allen & Heath’s dLive platform, which helped consolidate their system. “We were looking at getting an external server to run plugins on their existing consoles,” recalled Lusignan. “But once we factored in all the inserts and plugins that dLive has accessible natively, it eliminated the need for any external processing. We were kind of killing two birds with one stone by replacing their console with dLive: they got a much better and more up-to-date console, and also scratched that itch for more plugins and processing.”
The organization’s dual campuses in San Diego and Sacramento are now running identical systems, with 24-fader dLive C3500 control surfaces at front of house and CDM64 MixRacks for I/O and channel processing. The surfaces are also equipped with Dante cards to split off to the broadcast mix.
For monitor consoles, Lusignan’s team put in a pair of Allen & Heath SQ-7s with DX168 stageboxes for additional outputs. “The band is ecstatic about the improvement,” he said. “Their in-ear mixes have come through so much clearer, and they don’t need to set up drastic EQ curves to compensate anymore. It’s really fun when a client notices an immediate difference.”
Lusignan and his organization first took notice of Allen & Heath’s product line in 2020. “I saw some articles about the Avantis online, and it seemed a little too good to be true,” he recalled. “Then I ended up using one that belonged to a friend of mine, and was really impressed.” At another install, Lusignan brought along an Avantis to compare to the venue’s existing console. “I ran an A/B test to hear the difference with the same PA in the exact same room. It was crazy to hear the difference in clarity and how much more space there was to the sound.”
For a later upgrade at The Rock Church, Lusignan decided to spec an Avantis with a Dante card and several DT164-W Dante-enabled stageboxes for distributed I/O throughout the venue. “It was really cool how we could digitally split those same Dante inputs to their in-ear mixer, front of house console, and the broadcast mix – all right from the floor boxes,” he recounted. “It was super easy to integrate, and the client is still happy with it. It’s so simple and easy to use.”
The Allen & Heath platform’s ease of use has been a major selling point to Lusignan, since his company is focused on house of worship clients. “I can get people trained on (Avantis) in under an hour,” he explained. “With churches, it’s often volunteers with limited experience mixing, and they just feel at home on those consoles. It’s a huge plus for me.”
