I’m going to share my current method of recording the audio for church sermons and special events that I currently employ as one of the audio/tech guys for our church.

For sound amplification, we currently use a wired microphone on a stand, hooked up to a powered mixer with a built in amplifier. Basic 12″ speakers are wired directly to the amplifier. That takes care of the “live” sound.

Recording the sound turned out to be a little trickier. For years, we recorded with a line level feed directly to a 20+ year old audio tape recorder. When it came time to switch to a digital work flow, I did a little research to find the best solution. Recording direct to CD was one option, but what if the message went over 80 minutes? A line running to the sound card on my laptop was another option, but that could prove to be a little too complicated for my liking. I ended up going for the Olympus LS-10, a digital voice recorder that records at 24bit/96khz direct to either the 2GB of built in memory, or an optional SD card. The bonus with this recording unit is that it also has directional stereo recording with the built-in electret-condenser microphone which is great for recording live singing or family sharing times.

For standard sermon audio recordings I

  1. use a line level direct connection to the mixer
  2. copy the resultant digital .wav file to my laptop
  3. down sample to a mono .wav file from the LS-10’s stereo file
  4. record to audio cd and label it for lending out
  5. “rip” the cd with iTunes (gets better quality sound with a very low bitrate for some reason) to .mp3 for the podcast
  6. enter all the meta data for the ID3 tags and upload to the website

That’s it. There are a few steps that I haven’t mentioned related to podcasting, but wanted to focus on the recording aspect, mostly. So, what methods does your church use for recording sermons?