Two Mixers, One Sound System: Building a Church House Mixer

Plenty of churches meet in a gym or multipurpose room. On Sunday a full console rolls out and runs the service. On a weeknight, a small team plugs a wireless mic and some music into a little mixer. Both need the same speakers, and when nobody owns the speakers, someone ends up re-patching before every event.

At First Friends Church, I solved this with a dedicated house mixer: a Behringer X32 Rack. It takes in both systems over Dante, feeds the speakers, and switches between the Sunday and weekday setups by loading a saved scene. Bitfocus Companion and a Stream Deck handle the button-pushing, including on a schedule.

Why One Console Can’t Own the Speakers

Concerts already work this way. The opening band and the headliner often mix on different consoles, and at a festival each artist may bring their own console and engineer. Something downstream still has to feed the speakers.

First Friends met in their gym on Sundays. Their lighting, ProPresenter and Yamaha CL5 audio console rolled out on carts and connected to the network each Sunday. For the rest of the week the CL5 was put away, so something else had to control the speakers during weekday events.

The sports ministry had a small mixer with a wireless mic and a Bluetooth audio input. That let the sports team control the volume of their own inputs. But neither the CL5 nor the sports mixer could be the one responsible for sending audio straight to the speakers.

Give the speakers one owner. Every console feeds the house mixer, and only the house mixer feeds the speakers. Switching events then means loading one scene, not re-patching the building.

What I Did Before

For about a year, I switched things by hand in Dante Controller. I routed the channels going to the speakers from either the sports setup or the front-of-house console. It worked, but Dante Controller can’t automate routing changes, so the switching had to happen somewhere else.

Why an X32 Rack for the House Mixer

The X32 Rack had the right number of inputs and outputs for the job, and it cost less than a lot of other options. The church also already owned one. It had been part of the in-ear monitor system on stage, but we outgrew it and moved the in-ears to a Behringer WING. The X32 Rack went to the amp room to serve out its days as the house mixer.

That’s worth remembering when your church upgrades a console. A retired digital mixer can take on a job like this one.

What Feeds the House Mixer

Everything reaches the X32 Rack over the Dante network. Here’s the signal map as I built it:

Source	Where it lives	What it sends	X32 Rack channels
Yamaha CL5 (Sunday front of house)	Rolled out on Sundays	Main L/R, a subwoofer mix, and a hallway mix (a matrix off main L/R)	Main L/R on 1–2; sub and hallway feeds on 8–9 (subs on 9)
Small analog sports mixer	Sports room, which doubled as the video control room	Stereo quarter-inch output, through a Dante AVIO adapter	5–6
Allen & Heath SQ5 (broadcast console)	Control room	Main L/R	Reserved for a future scene

The SQ5 feed was there for later. The plan was a scene where the broadcast console’s main mix goes to the speakers, so more complicated events could be run entirely from the control room.

Where the House Mixer Sends Audio

The X32 Rack sends its main L/R over Dante to a Danley DSP processor. The processor receives that Dante signal and outputs four channels to the amplifiers.

Whether the subs and hallway speakers get a matrix of the main mix or their own dedicated inputs depends on which scene is loaded.

Who Controls What

• The CL5 operator mixes the Sunday service, including the sub and hallway feeds it sends to the house mixer.
• The sports team controls the volume of their own mic and music on their small mixer.
• The house mixer’s scene decides which of those reaches the speakers, the subs and the hallway.
• Companion and the Stream Deck decide which scene is loaded, either at the push of a button or on a schedule.

Two Scenes Do All the Switching

Everything that changes between a weekday event and Sunday is saved as a scene on the X32 Rack. I numbered them scene 4 and scene 5, for no better reason than that it sounded good at the time.

Scene 4: Sports (Gym) Mode

• The sports mixer input is set to unity into the main L/R mix.
• Main L/R is turned up in Matrix 1 and 2, which feed the subwoofers. The sports system gets to use the subs, and because they’re fed from a bus, their level can be adjusted.
• Main L/R is also turned up in Matrix 3, which feeds the hallway speakers. Because it’s a matrix, the hallway hears the same audio as the room, with its own volume control.

Scene 5: Sunday Mode

• The front-of-house input from the CL5 is set to unity into the main L/R output.
• The CL5’s subwoofer feed on channel 9 goes to the subs mix bus on output 2.
• The front-of-house main mix also goes to Matrix 3, which feeds the hallway speakers with volume control.

The switch involves a lot of changes. Going to Sunday mode fades the front-of-house inputs up and the sports input down, along with everything else in the scene. Going back to gym mode reverses it all.

Why the Scenes Live on the X32, Not in Companion

Bitfocus Companion has a large set of X32 actions. I could have built the whole switch as a stack of button actions for routing changes, channel volumes and mutes.

I chose not to, on purpose. I saved the setup as scenes on the X32, so it lives on the mixer instead of in Companion. If the Companion setup ever stopped working, or even got deleted, the church wouldn’t be stuck relying on actions stacked onto buttons to get the sound system running.

Companion is a convenience. We already used it that way for turning on the projector, which could also be done from the projector’s web page, its remote or the button on the projector itself. The house mixer has the same kind of fallbacks:

• Walk up to the amp room and load the Sunday or gym scene on the X32 Rack’s own control surface.
• Connect with X32-EDIT and load the scene from a computer.

Ask yourself: if the automation disappeared tomorrow, could someone still run the room? Build it so the answer is yes.

Automating the Switch With Companion and a Stream Deck

One Button per Mode

I put two buttons on the Stream Deck home page, Sunday mode and gym mode, which load scene 5 and scene 4. Switching the whole room takes one press.

Scheduled Triggers

Then I took it one big step further. In Companion I set up triggers that run before and after the Wednesday rehearsal, and before and after Sunday services. They switch the X32 between gym mode and Sunday mode automatically at the right times during the week.

Showing Which Mode Is Active

I’ve come to love Companion feedbacks, which change a button’s color based on what’s true. For example, a button turns blue when the projector is on and red when it’s off. I wanted the same thing here, so anyone could glance at the Stream Deck and see which mode was active.

In the version I used, though, there was no feedback for “this X32 scene is active.” So I built one with a variable:

1. Create a custom variable in Companion. I called mine last X32 scene.
2. On the gym mode button, add a press action called set raw value and set the value to 4.
3. On the Sunday mode button, add the same action with a value of 5.
4. Add a feedback to both buttons called variable check value. The gym mode button turns green when the variable is 4, and the Sunday mode button turns green when it’s 5.

Now each button press also sets the variable to the scene number it loads, and the matching button lights up.

This has one limit you should know about. If someone changes the scene outside Companion, the color will be wrong. That includes someone deliberately loading a scene on the X32 Rack in the amp room. It’s unlikely, but make sure your team knows the colors show the last button pressed, not a reading from the console. If you add scheduled triggers of your own, check that they update the same variable as well.

Plan for the Companion Computer Being Off

The computer running Companion lived in the control room, and the Stream Deck stayed on 24/7. Any time the sports ministry was using the gym, they could see which mode the system was in.

The weak spot is that computer. If it got shut down and missed a scheduled switch from Sunday mode to gym mode, the sports team had one instruction: turn the computer back on. It signs in automatically and Companion loads on its own, which brings the Stream Deck back up.

Three things make that recovery work for volunteers:

• Automatic sign-in on the Companion computer, so nobody needs a password.
• Companion loading on its own at startup, so the buttons come back without anyone opening software.
• A one-line recovery step given to the people most likely to notice a problem.

Troubleshooting a Two-Mixer System

The gym is silent at a weekday event. A scheduled switch may have been missed. Look at the Stream Deck and press gym mode. If the Stream Deck is dark, turn the Companion computer on. As a last resort, load scene 4 on the X32 Rack or from X32-EDIT.

Sunday audio isn’t reaching the speakers. Confirm Sunday mode (scene 5) is loaded. Remember too that the CL5 lives on a cart, so it has to be rolled out and connected to the network before its Dante feeds exist.

The Stream Deck shows the wrong mode. Someone probably loaded a scene on the X32 Rack or from X32-EDIT. Press the correct mode button to reload the scene and bring the colors back in sync.

The weekday mic is too quiet or too loud. The house mixer holds the sports input at unity, so start with the volume controls on the sports team’s own mixer.

The hallway or subs are wrong in only one mode. Each scene feeds them differently. In gym mode they come from matrices of the main mix. On Sunday the subs use the CL5’s dedicated sub feed and the hallway uses Matrix 3. Check the scene that’s misbehaving, not both.

Is a House Mixer Right for Your Room?

If only one console ever uses your speakers, you don’t need this. Route that console to the speakers and move on.

A house mixer earns its place when two or more systems share one set of speakers, especially when one of them rolls away between events. It also makes sense if you’ve been switching routes by hand in Dante Controller and want it automated. You’ll need your sources on a shared audio network (this build used Dante throughout) and a mixer you can dedicate to the job.

Watch the Video

I show the house mixer in the amp room, the Dante feeds, both scenes and the Companion setup. You can jump to what feeds the house mixer, scenes 4 and 5, the Companion buttons and triggers, the button color trick or why the scenes live on the X32.

Gear mentioned in this guide

Affiliate links — clicking them helps support what we do at no cost to you.

• Dante AVIO 2-Channel Input Adapter — gets a small analog mixer’s stereo output onto the Dante network, the way the sports mixer connects here. Buy →
• Elgato Stream Deck XL (32 Buttons) — plenty of room for mode buttons next to the rest of your system controls. Buy →

Keep Going

• New to Companion? Start with our Bitfocus Companion and Stream Deck overview.
• See another job an X32 Rack can do: using the X32 Rack as an IEM mixer and stage box for FOH.
• The manual fallback runs through X32-EDIT, so read X32-EDIT and M32-EDIT: control your X32 from a computer.
• See every production system we work on.

More training is on the YouTube channel: youtube.com/@CrazyAmazingDesigns.