Audio setup for a church...

Sincerity vs. sarcasm. That's why I used a winky. **** winkies don't always work!

Using garage band just to record audio should be perfectly fine. There's no difference in recording quality between it and Logic. That has more to do with the quality of the input signal and then the interface itself. Could be that there's some kind of grounding problem or impedence mismatch between the outputs of your board (which does sound like a bunch of trouble) and the computer. Or, it could be that there are grounding problems or bad gain staging at the board which translates into line noise in the recordings.

An analog board gives you instant access to the various knobs you'd need to be able to make a successful recording, as well as foldback to the PA and monitors. If you don't need a whole lot of inputs, a Mackie 1642 might be a great choice. It's really small, sounds good, has four stereo faders, lots of routing options to get signal to the computer, inputs for auxiliary sound sources, feed to the PA, monitors, and so on.

In short, "go modular" with your approach: computer for recording. CD or iPod or other devices for audio playback of other stuff. Board acting as a central hub for it all. Good grounding and proper gain staging will help to ensure good sound quality regardless of what system you end up using.

Wow, you're worried about gear getting stolen in a church? I think you should use your powers of persuasion to convince your pastor to reinforce the "thou shalt not steal" commandment.

😉

Just curious... why do you want to ditch the mixing board? Also, why XLR to USB? Why not XLR straight-up?

Recording on computer? No problem. That's easy. But my feeling is that you need to be more specific about why you want to make this huge change. Also, you mentioned piano and organ. Fine. Each one mic'd in stereo or mono? Then there's the pastor's mic... Any other inputs? Also, feeds... Do you also feed the sound system? So all these questions are leading to the key question: how many total inputs and outputs do you need right now, and how many might you want to expand to (if at all) in the future?

BTW, all of this will be significantly easier if you just keep the mixing board (unless it's really a piece of garbage). Absolutely everything about running live sound is easier when you use a board as opposed to software where you can only adjust one thing at a time, and sometimes have to access different "pages" to get to those controls.

Sounds like you have got a digital board, which can be quite complicated. Yamaha LS9 maybe? Anyhow, I would suggest selling it and getting a solid analog console to replace it. Soundcraft or Allen & Heath comes to mind. I think it will be a hard road ahead if not nearly impossible to ditch a mixing console totally. I mix in churches all the time from digital Yamaha's to analog Midas heritage stuff, the analog console will put you right. Then get your computer, sound card and integrate that into you web streams.Two totally different animals there. 🙂

Deathwoozle,

One unit handles everything.

That's a fine theory. Once you start living the reality you'll probably have a much different view.

One unit to troubleshoot when it screws up.

Right. One unit goes bad and takes your entire system down.

My advice? Take delton's advice. Oh, and learn to take a joke (stealing, commandments, etc.)

It sounds like the mixing board you guys have was a bad choice for your application. A simple mixing board would be perfect for what you're doing, something like a mackie 802 or 1202.

It would make sense to use a computer for playback, although if you're doing the equivalent of replacing CD and cassette players, it might be just as easy to use an ipod for that. But you wouldn't want to run all the live sound through the computer, it's unnecessarily complicated and too much risk of something going wrong.

Get a simple analog mixing board and hook up a computer for playback and/or recording. Extremely simple to use, instant on, and very low chance of failure.

I would continue to use a board for live sound, just add a computer to do recording or streaming and feed it outputs from the board.