Church sound and AV system diagrams

What does a small church sound system look like?

A digital mixer at the back of the room, a stagebox at the front, and a cable between them that carries every channel. Here is the system used through the rest of this page, for a building seating about 200:

The delay speaker needs a delay time so it lines up with the mains; the free speaker delay calculator gives it from the distance.

How do you wire the stage box, FOH and in-ear monitors?

Everything on stage plugs into the stagebox, and the stagebox talks to the desk over its digital link: AES50, dSnake or Dante, depending on the mixer. Mains, delay and wedges come back out of the stagebox outputs, so no analogue multicore runs down the aisle. In-ear transmitters take two of the desk's aux mixes.

Write down which source goes to which input before anyone plugs in. This is the stage patch for the example:

How do you add a livestream or overflow feed?

Give the stream its own mix. The room mix sounds wrong online, because the room adds the reverb and the band's acoustic level that the stream doesn't hear. Send a separate aux to the stream computer, and take the cameras into it over NDI: with PoE cameras, one network cable carries video, control and power to each PTZ.

For the overflow room, send the projector's feed or the stream computer's output over HDBaseT, which runs HDMI up to about 100 m on one Cat6 cable. Check your upload speed against the stream settings with the streaming bitrate calculator.

How do I draw it so volunteers can follow it?

Draw the whole system in Patchify from the device library, with each area in its own zone: stage, desk, room, overflow. Each cable gets a number, so a volunteer who finds an unplugged lead can look the number up instead of guessing. Ports only connect where the signals match, so the drawing can't send the stream feed into a mic input by mistake.

What should a volunteer handover document include?

• The signal flow diagram, with cable numbers.
• The stage patch and which aux feeds which wedge, in-ear or stream.
• Where the stagebox, switches and power are, and what's on which circuit.
• A start-up and shut-down order, so amplifiers come on last and go off first.
• Who to call when something breaks.

Patchify's project report puts the diagram, cable schedule, equipment list, power and notes in one PDF. On the Pro plan, job sheets add a checklist volunteers tick through on the day, with a sign-off.