Stone Creek Church in the North Atlanta suburb of Milton is a popular Sunday service focused church that welcomes a congregation of 800 every week. Centred on a contemporary worship style that combines live music with traditional prayer, Stone Creek offers worshippers a modern, non-denominational place to practice their faith.
The church hosts three services every Sunday at 9am, 10.45am and 12.30pm, as well as additional events throughout the week including youth groups and dinners with staff and group leaders for new church members. Since the Sunday service is such a spectacle, Stone Creek Church required a new communications system to carry the events reliably. They met their needs with an affordable and user-friendly solution from PunQtum.
“Stone Creek relies on a core team of volunteers and staff that have little to no production experience,” begins Johny Ragin, technology director at the church. “PunQtum offers a solution that’s extremely easy-to-use and set up – pretty much anyone can use it straight out of the box. Our productions on a Sunday are quite large and require a lot of behind-the-scenes work, so having an effective communications system makes everything run smoother.”
Stone Creek Church utilises both a PunQtum Q210 P and Q210 PW speaker station as the backbone of the system, alongside the brand’s Q110 beltpacks. The church was given the set up as part of the Church Production Road Test Experience hosted by Church Production magazine, in which various houses of worship across the US were given technology to test out in their own venues. What Stone Creek found was that PunQtum delivered ease-of-use, clarity and quality to their busy Sunday services.
“The beltpack is robustly built with just a few inputs and outputs on it,” Ragin explains. “It’s simple to set up and has a nice LCD display to show which line you’re on and who is talking – it’s very intuitive. The beltpack is mainly plug and play, although you can get a lot more customised with it if you want to. Usually with networking things, it’s a lot more complex than that – you’re dealing with entering a bunch of IP addresses and getting things to see each other on the network. Fortunately, this was so much easier than that. You literally just plug it into the network and start talking – that’s it!”
The Q210 P from PunQtum gives users full control over their communication in a cost-effective package. With four channels of partyline and customisable buttons, the speaker station is also accompanied by software that configures the system based on the needs of an individual church’s team. Additionally, the Q210 PW adds wireless capabilities when paired with the PunQtum Wireless app. The free-to-download app effectively works as an additional beltpack that’s accessible from any smartphone.
“We had two base stations for the Q210. The first was at Front of House as a central hub where we could have audio, lighting, a couple of camera operators, graphics and a media switcher. Those could all be on one base station. The second one was backstage so that we could talk with our green room and backstage techs. In addition to that, you have some audio inputs and outputs, so if you wanted to connect a console feed from your Front of House mixing board or monitor console, you could pass that audio along to your packs and headsets as well.”
What really stood out for the Stone Creek team was the sound quality delivered by the PunQtum solution. “Audio quality was something I was very curious about, especially coming from a wireless solution. The first thing that a couple of my volunteers said was, ‘Wow, it sounds so good!’ We were genuinely blown away.” The Stone Creek team also loved the ability to mute all mics from the base station, and the ability to set up permissions for specific people to communicate over the system.
“I think the PunQtum Q Series intercom system is an awesome step up for any church that wants to expand their current intercom system or even step up one from scratch,” concludes Ragin.
