Found in Translation

Our Spanish translation room is finally completed! Here's the scoop: over 100 William Sound receivers are picked up every Sunday by our Spanish-only attendees, and we are getting ready to order over 200 more receivers to divide between Spanish and our upcoming Portuguese listeners. Our translator, Steve Lingo (perfect name huh?), uses a Studio Projects C1 large diaphragm condenser microphone suspended by an O.C. White boom. This is processed and given phantom power by a Behringer ULTRAVOICE DIGITAL VX2496, providing mic pre, compression, EQ, and expander (it also has a de-esser and tube emulation, but we don't use them). From the VX2496 the signal moves to a Soundcraft Spirit M4 mixer. The Spanish translation leaves the M4 mixer via post fader aux send straight to the Williams Sound transmitter down in the sanctuary. This feed also goes to an AES converter on channel 3 of our SD-SDI alternate venue feed to be sent to the Plantation and Boca Raton campuses via 200mbs fiber so that translation is heard there as well... but that's another huge post! Steve's M4 mixer also has a stereo feed of the house mix/audience mics which is recorded to DVD (that, believe it or not, sounds fantastic thanks to Michael Grosso, our FOH engineer). After praise and worship is over, Steve brings down the house mix, brings up his channel along with a stereo channel containing our stereo house audience mics. SO, during the sermon, you hear a Spanish translation with the aural sense of the live room. When the audience laughs or applauds, you hear it crystal clear on the Spanish DVD or CD (HHB Burn-IT) in full stereo glory. The HHB gets it's audio from the M4's optical/digital output, how cool is that? Our translator also has his own mixer... a Behringer Eurorack UB1202. With access to all signals, he can adjust it to his heart's content. He puts his own voice in the left ear hard-L, and the speaker's voice in his right ear hard-R. He has two JVC 9" color monitors. One shows what the DVD recorder is recording (program broadcast line cut), the other "confidence" monitor shows the IMAG feed which shows the teacher 98% of the time. About 15 minutes after the service ends, you can purchase a Spanish translated sermon on DVD or CD in full stereo. Both translation rooms are sealed and we are installing the acoustic wedge foam (75% coverage) this week (www.soundsuckers.com). I'm sorry if this doesn't quite describe the setup, please ask questions.

PS: This room will double as a voice-over room for quick VOs when the recording studio is busy. The Studio Projects line of microphones is probably the best value on the market. The C1 isn't quite a U87, but at $200 it sounds like a $1200 mic easily.