As Technology Platforms Evolve, “Scalability” Should Inform Your AVL Gear Choices

Planning for your faith facility’s growth should be a key driver in all your gear decisions.

By: Landry Wilkinson

If you’re responsible for technology for your worship facility, you’re constantly asking yourself and others: what tech gear could make the worship experience better for our congregation? This is an excellent question and should always be top of mind when tackling technology issues, including audio, video, and lighting. However, it should also be about your bigger goals, not just particular pieces, or brands, of equipment. Growth - and planning for growth – must be in the forefront of decision-making when looking at the bigger picture of what you want to achieve with your worship facility. Scalability is key. As your congregation grows, you may also eventually need to expand your facilities and even open another campus - not now, but in the future. What AVL gear can you get in place now to ensure that you can scale up later as you grow? Scalability means growing your tech ecosystem for your expanding congregation without making redundant expenditures or having to replace gear.

Over the next few months, we will be addressing the topic of scaling for growth with a series of articles, videos, and other resources. In this article, I’ll start by focusing on what is arguably the biggest trend today – to set the stage as you plan how you’ll acquire gear for today’s needs, while making sure that you’re “futureproofing” for expansion and growth down the road.

The AV over IP Trend

Transmission of both audio and video signals are increasingly moving into a networked environment. This isn’t a huge surprise as the move from analog to digital started years ago. However, the key to understanding the challenges is to realize that you won’t be replacing analog point-to-point transmission with digital point-to-point.

It’s about true digital networking with the needed control, standards, interoperability, and ease of use that computer networks have brought to IT as well personal computing. How do you make sense of all the IT language around standards, uncompressed bandwidth, latency, gigabit switches, and more? How do you future-proof your AV selections for the best that AV over IP will offer? Start with looking at two of the biggest drivers of networked audio and video: Dante for audio, and NDI for video. There are more AV/IP offerings available, but these two are a great place to start.

Dante

This one word will make life for you and your worship facility tech team easier down the road, for networking with all your other systems. Start educating yourself and your staff now, to get ahead of the curve. Dante refines digital networking, so that gear from different manufacturers can seamlessly talk to other gear. It allows complete real time AV over IP based on the new generation gigabit switches that are available in the market. What does it accomplish?

Uncompressed full bandwidth audio, across a network. Dante – licensed by Audinate – is available in over 3,000 products from more than 500 manufacturers, covering a diverse range of installations and applications across industries, including house of worship. Since Dante can be used with existing networks, many of these applications benefit from infrastructure that is already in place. The main benefit of Dante-enabled gear is the ability to expand your audio systems as your congregation grows. This was once more expensive in terms of infrastructure such as audio cabling and snakes, switchers, and more. But now, lower cabling costs, and a well-designed network provides enhanced flexibility for future changes to the system. Audio routing can be changed on the fly, and it does not require any rewiring.

Dante sound cards are now available for many consoles and mixers including software mixing tools for laptops and tablets. In addition, most top manufacturers build Dante into their products. So, what does this mean for you? What should you know to help future-proof your gear selection? Enquiring about Dante compatibility is a must, as you select mixing consoles, loudspeakers, video over IP cameras, and products in the networked AV ecosystem. And, importantly, planning for Dante – r any other AV/IP ecosystem – will get you further along the path of future proofing and network-proofing your entire ecosystem as the movement towards digital is inevitable.

Continue the story by clicking here: https://tfwm.com/magazine-issue-042022/#Infrastructure_SoundPro_0422