Church Uses Eclipse and Tempest2400 to Reorganize Communications Across Multi-Building Complex
Clear-Com®, a global leader in mission-critical voice communication systems, is helping Eastside Christian Church deliver the message of faith to the thousands of congregants attending its services each weekend. The production staff members rely on a 16-port Clear-Com Eclipse Median digital matrix intercom frame and Tempest®2400 four-channel wireless intercom system for reliable, high-quality and readily accessible communications across disparately located production areas, ensuring the flawless delivery of audio and video for every service.
Clear-Com’s Eclipse and Tempest give Eastside Christian Church staff members a communications pipeline that maintains the highest level of sound quality in virtually all areas of the facility, allowing them to coordinate and manage the production demands of the church’s five regular weekend services with great ease and efficiency. Previously, staff members made due with a single-channel communications system cobbled together from a few wired intercoms with handsets and radios. This inadequate and unreliable setup often led to staff having to shout to each other about a particular issue and/or walk to different areas of the facility to resolve a problem, creating a distractive environment for other team members.
“We needed communication tools that were reliable, professional, user-friendly, effective and yet economical, and could handle the communication challenges in our layout,” says Chris Gille, Chief Systems Engineer, Eastside Christian Church. “Our video is in an attic, up a spiral staircase, the booth is on the main floor, and there are offices that wrap around the stage area, as well as in separate buildings. Clear-Com’s Eclipse and Tempest intercom systems work very well with this setup. Their ease-of-use, flexibility and expandability have reduced distractions and improved efficiency for the production staff.”
Currently, there are approximately four to six staff members and six to eight volunteers who use one Clear-Com Eclipse Median and one Tempest2400 wireless system with four BeltStations to coordinate the audio, video, lighting and staging needs of Eastside Christian Church’s services and events. Tempest’s ISO capability has come in handy, as it allows the producer to communicate via the BeltStation’s headset to the in-ear monitors of band members playing on stage. For additional coverage, the church employs Clear-Com’s CCI-22 partyline interface for the Eclipse Median, i-station series intercom stations, ICS-1016 digital intercom stations and an Encore™ RM-702 two-channel remote intercom station with FL-7 call signal flashers.
“Eastside Church’s unique layout, with its video control suite situated in the attic space of the octagon-shaped main sanctuary and numerous production spots in other areas of the complex, is the exact type of challenge for which we developed the Eclipse and Tempest solutions,” says Michael Rucker, Senior Sales Manager, Central Region, Clear-Com. “The combination of Tempest’s flexibility and Eclipse’s expandability makes communications vastly simplified, resulting in a better experience for the congregants and crew members alike. We’re proud to be part of the solution for Eastside Christian Church.”To accommodate a growing congregation, Eastside Christian Church is planning to relocate its main campus by 2012. According to Gille, the ability of Clear-Com’s intercom systems to adapt to such an expansion, especially one that requires using the Eclipse and Tempest together, was one of the reasons the products were chosen by the church. “The Eclipse frame is at the heart of the new system, ready to expand to whatever the new space applications will require. It’s comforting to know that Eclipse can handle this, as well as the fact that it does so much more beyond intercom communications. With relays, audio routing, metering, signalling, phone interface and so on, it’s a great hub for unique problem-solving and unusual applications.”
Gille is also impressed with Clear-Com’s customer support. “Clear-Com has always been very honest, responsive and concerned with any and every question I have ever had. The company makes me feel like a VIP, and beyond that, I’ve worked with a few specific individuals whose support has actually fostered friendships. With Clear-Com continuing to pioneer new, innovative technologies, we’re looking forward to continuing our relationship into the future.”
Clear-Com’s Eclipse Median is part of its popular Eclipse digital matrix intercom family, which provides a flexible and scalable foundation for point-to-point and group multi-connections, offering as many as 3,120 user connections on a networked system platform. Tempest2400, meanwhile, is a digital wireless intercom system that operates in a license-free frequency band where it is fundamentally resistant to inference from other wireless devices, ensuring that communications go off without a hitch in even the most crowded RF environments.