Note from Brandon:
This is a guest post from Marcos Esparza at Austin Christian in Austin, Texas. He’s going to walk through how his worship team introduced Audiofusion into their setup.
Take it away Marcos!
Marcos Esparza with Austin Christian here, and I want to run through our setup and a tutorial on our Audiofusion system, the wireless in-ear system that is using completely your phone and there is no pack or transmitter and is broadcasted audio through WiFi. I want to give you just a quick background on why we decided to opt for Audiofusion to help you in your church if you’re deciding whether this is a good fit for you.
Here’s what our setup already looked like before Audiofusion:
We all have iPhones
We have a Mac laptop
We also have a Behringer X32 digital board
So at our church, the musicians—the keyboard, the guitarist, the drummer, the bassist—all already had an in-ear system with stationary Behringer P16s. We got those a few years ago and they’ve been great, but we never got it for the vocalists. The reason why is because the vocalists are not stationary. They’re out and about walking on stage. And we figured, well, they can hear the band and they have floor wedges for their monitor. They don’t need an in-ear system. Well, hold on… I’ll tell you why they actually would in a moment.
Shortly after getting the P16s, we started using clicks and tracks, which further enhanced our worship service. Now, we don’t use them all the time. It just kind of depends on the song and what we want to do as a worship team.
Fast forward now a couple of years, the vocalists still have a hard time with a couple things: they’re either wanting to hear their own mix, they can’t hear themselves, or they need to hear a certain instrument. So they’re bugging the sound engineer while he’s doing 50 billion other things (God bless our sound engineers). Or there is a song where the drum is not keeping the tempo and it’s sort of an ambient type of song where there’s pad. In another scenario, the musicians are hearing a click in their ear, but the vocalist is off on tempo. And sometimes, as a musician, you’re not sure whether you should follow the singer or you should follow the click. Our worship team always kind of struggled with that.
By now, we were pretty sick of the vocalist not having in-ears like the rest of the team. And so we go online and call our Sweetwater rep to price out some in-ears for like maybe five vocalists and… good night! I don’t know if you guys ever priced that out. If you want a really good, sturdy, reliable wireless pack for in-ears, you have to buy a transmitter for each pack. So it’s not like you can do one transmitter and then have four or five packs that it can transmit to.
It was pretty expensive. I mean, I want to say like $4,000-$5,000. It was almost shocking how expensive those little things are. And we didn’t want to do cheap. We wanted to do something that was sturdy. Like many churches where the budget is very limited in terms of how much we can spend on audio equipment. Audio equipment’s pretty expensive for the good quality kind.
Audiofusion then came along with an in-ear system. It works off of your iPhone. You can control the mix and you receive the signal off the iPhone via a private Wifi signal, which is pretty incredible. Brandon at Audiofusion then said, “Hey, you know, $99 per Performer, instead of paying $5,000… and you would pay $500 instead.” So it was a no brainer to go that route for us. We did have to buy a new robust, dedicated Wifi router which I’ll talk to you about in a second.
It just depends on how many performers you have onstage at one time. For example, you don’t have to buy connections for all of your vocalists. Instead, it’s just how many vocalists you’ll have on stage at one time.
As far as our specific setup, we all have iPhones, and we already had a digital board. They could transmit a digital signal to the Mac. So all we did is we got a USB cord from the board to the Mac, and then the Mac is connected by ethernet to a really robust Wifi router. We opted for the AC 2600 MU-MIMO Gigabyte Router. We’re broadcasting on the 5Ghz channel and scanned the area ahead of time to make sure that we didn’t have any WiFi interference.
There’s a couple apps that you can get that can scan the Wifi signal in your area. I highly recommend finding a channel that there is no one else on, and then trying to make the bandwidth as big as possible so that you can have a really good strong signal for the in-ear system.
Check out the video included with this post that walks you through our specific setup towards the end of the video.
When it comes to our SoundCaster setup, we selected the input source, X-UF, which is the signal that we get from the board that was connected. We then muted the signals that the vocalists don’t need. That way, they have as many channels available on their app to be able to control their mix.
We went through each channel and labeled them, which then gets synced up with the Performer app that the vocalists use. And when that’s done, each channel has a toggle at the bottom that allows each signal to be sent or muted.
One setting that was important for this whole thing to work was that my laptop had a privacy setting turned on for the sound, the internal or the sound man. I don’t know if it’s just the soundboard or whatever it was, but I had to go to the settings and turn that off so that I could be able to actually receive a signal. So if you guys get that same error, check the privacy settings for your sound in your macOS preferences
So that’s basically our setup! The biggest advice I’d give is basically making sure you do not compromise on the Wifi router and making sure that you get that set up properly.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment in the YouTube video.
