St. Joseph Catholic Church in Cottleville, MO was recently presented with a difficult dilemma. A large Lightolier dimming system was installed when the church was built in 1999. In recent years, the system had become unreliable due to failures in the controller portion of the system. Unfortunately, the system is out of production and the manufacturer no longer supports it (repairs or parts). Bob Emery, Maintenance Director for this large facility was able to patch the system together for a while, but in February of 2020 a large portion of the system stopped working altogether, leaving the 1500 seat church in the dark. Bob was fully aware that he was going to have to replace the aging system at some point, especially since it was designed for incandescent lighting, not LED. He also knew this was an important and costly endeavor. The church needed time to redesign the system properly and to budget the needed funds. Everyone he spoke with told him he would need to replace the whole system right now or waste resources on a stop gap solution that would be discarded later. He needed an alternative. They found a company that has been serving the technology needs of churches for the past 32 years.

We all know this is an unprecedented time we are living through. The COVID-19 virus has presented societal challenges we couldn’t imagine even a month ago. Social distancing has had a profound effect on work, school, recreation, and just about every aspect of day-to-day life in St. Louis and throughout the world.

In these difficult times, many turn to their faith. But the social nature and bonding of attending services and interacting with other congregants have been severely curtailed with social distancing measures. Fortunately, technology can bring some needed continuity to these vital social constructs. Read on to see how you can use church audio-video solutions to continue to serve congregants of every religion and denomination with messages and services that strengthen the bonds of community in St. Louis and beyond.

A well-functioning audio system is crucial to the life of any house of worship. The spoken word and music are important elements of most religious services. If you’ve noticed that your audio system seems to be suffering lately from intermittent drop-outs and/or noise, this could be related to your wireless microphones.

There’s a good chance that what’s causing issues with your wireless microphone systems has to do with the frequency these systems use to broadcast sound wirelessly. We’ll get into the technical details a little further on, but essentially a portion of the wireless spectrum used by wireless microphones in places like churches, theaters, schools and other venues has been auctioned off to telecommunications conglomerates by the FCC.

This could present a whole host of problems for churches using wireless microphone technology, but not to worry. We have extensive experience installing wireless microphone systems and church audio video systems, and we’d be happy to lend our expertise to any house of worship in Wildwood or any other area of Missouri or Illinois.