Founded in 1915, Emanuel Lutheran Church built its current campus on Santa
Barbara’s Modoc Road in 1969. A member congregation of the Lutheran Church,
Missouri Synod, the church holds worship services, bible studies and prayer groups
and hosts several local ministries.

Emanuel Lutheran’s audio system supports its blend of traditional liturgical elements
with hymns and contemporary music. In a desire to improve audio quality and
provide additional flexibility for its services, the church decided to upgrade its
system in late 2015.

Emanuel Lutheran asked Brian Thompson of TNR Electronics in Ojai, and Ed
Simeone of Dedicated Marketing in Westlake Village (both in California), to provide
the upgrade. They wanted improved voice intelligibility and music quality. They
wanted flexible configurations for their various services. And, they wanted a
“hands-off’ user interface for most services with the option of operator control
when needed.

Simeone chose Allen & Heath’s Qu-Pac digital audio mixer to fill these needs. It
offered the hands-off, automatic-mixer operation the church wanted and an iPad
interface for operator control when needed. The rack-mount Qu-Pac could be
hidden in the church’s equipment closet and had ample DSP for everything from
house equalization to reverb for the choir mics.

As part of the upgrade, Simeone added a pair of Tannoy VLS column loudspeakers
and connected them to the Qu-Pac’s main outputs. A Qu-Pac matrix output feeds
the church’s existing Bose loudspeakers (on delay) and another feeds their Listen
Technologies’ assistive listening system. Lab Gruppen amplifiers power the
loudspeakers and the church has eight wireless microphones, six wired
microphones, a Tascam CD recorder and a CD duplication system.

Simeone likes the Qu-Pac’s three access levels which allow the church to make
basic changes while preserving the core setups and he saved the entire Qu-Pac
configuration on a memory stick. He commented, “The church achieved all of their
goals from this upgrade and the Qu-Pac is now the heart of their system. It gave
the church one-button operation for most services and iPad control from anywhere
in the sanctuary when they need it. I trusted the Qu-Pac’s sound quality based on
my experience with Allen & Heath’s classic analog mixers, so the upgrade is really a
whole new system.’