CDM designs and installs production audio, video and DMX lighting control for churches and venues across West Georgia — on the same managed network as the WiFi, the cameras and the kids check-in. Whoever does not own that network cannot answer for the livestream dropping at 10:04.
Three ways this starts
Nearly every church AV call we take is one of these three. They need different scheduling and a different order of spending. The thing we are trying to protect is the same in all of them.
Either the church has never streamed and wants to, or it streams every week and the picture freezes, the audio drifts, and nobody can say with any confidence which box is at fault.
Sanctuary sound that a different volunteer added to every few years. Speakers aimed at the balcony rail, a monitor mix nobody on the platform can work with, and a snake that disappears somewhere under the stage.
AV, lighting and network get designed together, or they get retrofitted separately later at several times the price. Conduit and a booth position are cheap arguments on a drawing and expensive ones in finished drywall.
What the work is
Most AV companies stop at the fifth one and hand you a network you were already unhappy with. The stream does not care where one contract ends and the next begins.
Walk the room with usSpeakers, amplification and processing chosen for the room and aimed at the seats. Sanctuary sound is judged on whether the back row understands the sermon, not on what the front row can feel. Intelligibility first, level second.
Inputs off the platform that land where they are supposed to, wedge or in-ear monitoring, and confidence monitors so the people leading can see the lyrics, the clock and who is up next without turning around.
Camera positions that hold a sight line once the room is full, video switching a volunteer can run under pressure, and the projection and lobby displays fed off the same signal path instead of a separate accident.
The livestream treated as production infrastructure rather than an app somebody opens: a wired run to the booth, upload prioritized over guest traffic, and cellular failover for the morning the ISP picks Sunday to fail.
DMX lighting control with scenes that recall the same way every week, so the platform is lit for the camera as well as for the room and nobody is chasing faders by hand in the middle of a song.
The console, the cameras, the encoder, the lighting desk and the kids check-in share one infrastructure whether anyone designed it that way or not. We design it that way. Managed switching, VLANs and PoE sized for what is plugged into them.
Drawn before it is bought
Speaker coverage, camera sight lines, DMX runs and the network path get settled on paper first. A drawing can be argued with over coffee. A conduit that was never sleeved cannot.
Where the speakers point, where the cameras sit once the room is full, and where the booth gets a wired path back to the rack.
What happens when the primary line drops mid-service — the wired path breaks, the cellular connection carries the traffic instead, and the live stream, the cameras and the WiFi stay up.
One rack, laid out so the amplifiers, the encoder and the switch are not fighting each other for airflow or for a free hand.
What you keep
A production system that only one person can operate is a staffing problem wearing a rack. What gets written down at the end matters as much as what gets mounted.
Every input, output and port marked at both ends, so tracing a dead channel does not start with unplugging things to see what goes quiet.
Lighting scenes, camera shots and audio presets written down with what each one is for — so they get recalled on Sunday instead of rebuilt from scratch.
Whoever runs the board gets walked through it while we are still in the building. We would rather answer the phone on Thursday than get a text at 10:04.
The church owns the equipment and the credentials to every part of it. Handed over in writing, not kept by whoever installed it.
Production audio, video switching, projection, displays and DMX lighting control — plus the cabling, the rack and the managed network the whole thing runs on, from one company.
Rigging, structural mounting and line-voltage electrical. Anything hung over a congregation is engineered and installed by the trades that carry that liability. Room acoustics get coordinated with a specialist where placement alone will not fix the room.
Common questions
Usually by the person who has been holding the whole thing together on Sunday mornings and would like to stop.
Almost always the network, not the camera. A full sanctuary puts several hundred phones onto the same WiFi the encoder is trying to upload through, and most church networks give the stream no priority at all. The fix is a wired path to the booth, streaming traffic prioritized over guest traffic, and a failover connection for the morning the line goes down. That is why we will not quote production AV without looking at the network it rides on.
No. Most sanctuaries have something worth keeping — often the speakers, sometimes the amplifiers, rarely the cabling. We trace and test what is installed first, then tell you what is actually limiting the room and what order to spend in. A church can fix the audio this year and the lighting in two years, as long as the design accounts for both at the start.
That is the design constraint, not an afterthought. Scenes, presets and camera shots are built to be recalled rather than rebuilt, everything is labeled, and whoever runs the board gets walked through it while we are still in the building. If a system needs the one person who understands it to be there every single Sunday, it was built wrong.
It depends on the resolution and frame rate you stream at, and we will not put a number on your building before testing the connection you have. What matters more than the headline speed is whether the upload holds steady, whether anything else on the network can crowd it out, and what happens when the line drops mid-service. We measure all three during the assessment.
We think so, and it is most of the argument on this page. The console, the cameras, the encoder, the lighting desk and the kids check-in all ride one infrastructure. When AV and IT are two companies, a dropped stream at 10:04 becomes a phone call where each one explains that it is the other one’s problem. Cost depends on the size of the room, what is already installed and how much of it is being replaced — the free assessment comes first, and a written quote follows it.
Where we work
Nobody tunes a sanctuary remotely. Everything below is inside a comfortable drive of the shop, which also means we can be back before the next service.
No cost, no obligation
We come out on a weekday, listen to the room, look at what is installed and what it is plugged into, and tell you plainly what is holding the service back — the audio, the lighting, the cameras or the network under all of it. You get the findings whether or not you hire us.
Typical response — same business day
