The Overflow and Broadcast Feed

In a sanctuary, the drum kit at 105 to 120 dBA, the guitar amplifier at 95 to 110 and often the piano and the choir are all partly or wholly acoustic. The operator only puts through the loudspeakers what the room needs help with. Send that same mix to another room and everything acoustic is simply missing.

The single change that most improves an overflow or stream feed is adding one or two microphones pointed at the congregation. Without them the feed carries only what is on the platform, which sounds like a rehearsal in an empty building. With them it carries the congregation singing, the response, the laughter and the sense that something is happening in a room with people in it.

Hang two cardioid condensers above the congregation, roughly a third of the way back, angled down and away from the loudspeakers. Away from the loudspeakers is the important part: an audience microphone that mostly hears the PA gives you a hollow, delayed copy of the mix rather than the room. Keep them out of the house mix entirely, where they would only be a feedback risk, and use them only in the aux or matrix that feeds the remote destination. Mix them well down, since they are seasoning rather than a main ingredient.

There is no feedback risk here, which makes this the one position on the site where gain before feedback is not the governing constraint. The governing constraint is attention: the remote feed is the mix nobody is listening to. The operator is in the sanctuary mixing for the sanctuary, and the overflow room or the stream receives whatever happens to come out of that aux send, uncorrected, for the whole service.

The solution is organisational rather than technical. Someone has to listen to the feed, on headphones, at least at the start of every service, and there has to be a way for them to tell the operator when it is wrong. In a church with a livestream that person is usually the video operator, which is why a proper pair of headphones at that position is a real purchase rather than an accessory. Where the budget allows, a second person mixing the broadcast feed independently is the arrangement that actually works, and it is what every church with a good stream eventually arrives at.

A microphone at the back of the room sent to the overflow, which is unintelligible. A post fader aux copy of the house mix, which is missing the drums, the guitar and the piano. No audience microphones, so the feed sounds like an empty building. A stereo feed collapsed to mono in a ceiling speaker system, with phase cancellation taking out parts of the mix. And nobody listening, so a fault persists for the whole service and is discovered afterwards.

The other frequent error is treating overflow and stream as the same feed. They usually can be, but not always: an overflow room is a live audience hearing the service in real time and wants a mix close to the house balance, while a stream is heard on phone speakers and laptop screens and benefits from more compression, more vocal presence and less low end. If the console has two matrix outputs, use both. See church livestream audio setup for the streaming side.