What if your audio engineer could mix your church’s livestream from home? Or while traveling across the country? Or from literally anywhere in the world with a stable internet connection?
That’s exactly what I did this morning. I mixed Jake’s church’s livestream from our Churchfront studio—about five miles away from the actual service. And while this video was sponsored by BoxCast, this is something we’d be making content about regardless, because Mixing Station Anywhere is genuinely solving a real problem for churches.
But rather than just talking about it theoretically, I wanted to show you how it actually works in a live service environment.
The Setup: What You’re Actually Seeing
When you watch the video, you’re hearing me mix Rock Harbor’s 8:30 AM service in real-time. I’ve got my headphones on monitoring their audio feed directly from the Mixing Station Anywhere interface.
To make this demonstration clear, I recorded my microphone separately from the BoxCast audio feed. So when you hear the mix volume going up and down while I’m talking, that’s me doing it in post-production—not live during their service. But whenever I’m not talking, you’re hearing exactly what was being broadcast. No tricks, no edits. That’s their actual livestream mix.
One cool feature: I can monitor this audio from any sound card device attached to my computer. I could send it out to Dante if I wanted using something like Loopback. For this session, I was taking the audio feed from my browser and loading it directly into Ecamm Live to record it separately, along with my Dante interface for the microphone.
The Delay Factor (And How to Fix It)
When I first started this demo, I was using Safari and experiencing about a four-second audio delay. That sounds like a lot—and it is—but here’s what I didn’t realize at the time: using Chrome reduces the audio delay significantly.
With Chrome, the delay is typically under two seconds, and most of the time you can get it down to under one second. So if latency is a concern for you (and it probably should be), make sure you’re using Chrome for Mixing Station Anywhere.
This delay is also why I don’t recommend doing a channel-by-channel mix when working remotely. It’s much better to mix groups directly to the broadcast. We’re using post-fader mixes, so I’m just making small adjustments throughout the service rather than trying to ride individual faders on a delay.
Mixing the Service: What I’m Actually Doing
As Rock Harbor’s service started, you could see me making various mix adjustments in real-time. Here are some of the decisions I was making:
Managing Low End for Online: When Kaylee (Jake’s wife) came up to sing, there was a lot of low end in the tracks channel. I rolled some of that down in their broadcast tracks matrix. Not because it sounded bad—it didn’t—but because when you’ve got that much low end on an online mix, it can interfere with your mastering compressors. And let’s be honest: most people are watching your stream on their phones. So as nice as it is to have huge, full low end, I’d rather have clarity. I’m willing to sacrifice some of that low end from the tracks channels to keep things from being overwhelming online.
Vocal Adjustments: At various points, I pushed vocals up when they got lost in the mix or made subtle adjustments to individual singers. The great thing about Mixing Station Anywhere is I can jump between mixing the main broadcast groups and diving into individual channels when I need more precise control.
Fixing Sibilance Issues: When Kevin came up to do announcements, his mic was very sizzly—tons of high-end sibilance. I jumped into the processing for that bus and initially turned down some high end with a parametric EQ. But here’s where remote mixing gets collaborative: I texted Asa (their front-of-house engineer who was actually at the campus) and said, “Hey, it’s pretty sizzly up there.” He went ahead and put in a low-pass filter starting at 7.6 kHz with a slight roll-off. That took a lot of the harshness out of Kevin’s speaking voice without making him sound dull.
The Importance of Crowd Mics: I can’t overstate this enough. Even during the message—maybe especially during the message—crowd microphones are critical for your online mix. Without them, everything sounds direct and dead. With them, you get the life and energy of the room. If you don’t have crowd mics in your space, you need them.
How to Set This Up at Your Church
Here’s the practical part: how do you actually implement Mixing Station Anywhere?
What You Need:
- A BoxCast account
- Either one of their encoders OR the Mix Agent software installed on a local computer connected to the same network as your mixer
Important clarification: You don’t actually have to stream using BoxCast to use Mixing Station Anywhere. You can use Mixing Station Anywhere completely on its own as a standalone tool for about $10/month. So even if you’re using a different streaming platform, Mixing Station Anywhere can still be a great option for remote audio control.
Getting Started: When you log into your BoxCast dashboard and open your encoder (we used their Spark SDI at Jake’s church), Mixing Station Anywhere shows up as an option. Click it, and you’ll see all the mixers available on that network. In this case, we connected to their Allen & Heath Avantis Solo at front of house.
Virtual Groups: The Key to Effective Remote Mixing
One of the coolest features of Mixing Station Anywhere is the ability to create virtual groups. These act almost like an additional DCA layer in your mixer. The faders on the left-hand side can control all the faders within whatever groups you create.
For Jake’s church, I created six virtual groups:
- Broadcast (main layer)
- Broadcast Drums
- Broadcast Guitars
- Broadcast Vocals
- Broadcast Tracks
- Crowds
When you click on these groups, you have to remember to select both your layer AND your mix target. So when I’m on the broadcast drums layer, I need to make sure my mix target is set to “broadcast drums” before I start making changes.
Understanding the Mix Structure
At Rock Harbor, we’re using a combination of groups and mixes feeding into a broadcast matrix. Here’s what’s happening:
The Groups and Mixes:
- Broadcast Drums (stereo mix)
- Broadcast Tracks (stereo mix)
- Broadcast Guitars (stereo mix)
- Drum Smack (group – adds attack to drums)
- Crowds (stereo group from room mics)
- Broadcast Vocals (mix)
- Vocal Delay
- All Verb
- Snare Verb
- Vox Verb
- CG Computers
All of these are post-fader, so they’re dependent on how Asa is mixing in the room. This is actually what I recommend for most churches because once you get it set correctly, you don’t need to do extensive tweaking. If it sounds good in the room and you have a relatively consistent mix, it will translate well online.
Groups vs. Mixes: What’s the Difference?
This is important to understand if you’re setting up Mixing Station Anywhere:
Groups directly send audio from assigned channels at the same level they’re being sent to the mains using the normal channel faders.
Mixes (or auxes) have the ability to vary the amount of each channel being sent to that mix independently of the main faders.
Asa uses mixes at Rock Harbor because he wants fine control. But honestly, for most churches, we recommend sticking with groups rather than auxes/mixes because it’s simpler for volunteers. How you mix in-house is basically how it translates online. Then by routing those groups to a broadcast matrix, you can still do subtle control and variation.
Safety Features: Protecting Your FOH Mix
One critical consideration: Mixing Station Anywhere gives you full mixer control. That means whoever’s logged in remotely could theoretically mess with your front-of-house mix, which would be disastrous during a service.
There are two ways to handle this:
- Lock the remote user to a single mix – Set it up so they can only access your dedicated broadcast mix (like a post-fader aux). They can’t touch anything that affects your room mix.
- Trust factor – If you need access to multiple mixes and groups (like I did this morning), you have to really trust the person doing the remote mixing. During this session, I absolutely could have grabbed their main left-right fader and pushed it up or down. That would have been catastrophic for their in-person service.
Choose the approach that makes sense for your situation and team.
One More Feature: MIDI Fader Control
I didn’t show this in the video because I didn’t have access to it at the time, but Mixing Station Anywhere supports MIDI fader control. Using Chrome, you can connect a MIDI controller like a Behringer X-Touch and get actual tactile fader control while mixing remotely.
If you’re someone who really prefers physical faders over a mouse (and let’s be honest, most audio engineers do), this is kind of a big deal.
My Takeaway After Mixing Remotely
After mixing Rock Harbor’s service with Mixing Station Anywhere, here’s my honest assessment: This is the smoothest remote broadcast workflow I’ve used.
No complicated VPN setup. No laggy remote desktop sessions. Limited risk to your front-of-house mix if you set it up correctly. It’s fast, it’s clean, and it just works.
Could this be a game-changer for churches dealing with volunteer shortages? Absolutely. Could it help when your normal mixer is sick or out of town? Definitely. Could it allow you to have an experienced audio engineer dial in your broadcast even if they can’t physically be at your campus? Yes.
Mixing Station Anywhere isn’t going to replace having someone physically present for every situation, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool that solves real problems churches are facing with their broadcast teams.
If your church is struggling with consistent livestream mixing or you’re constantly scrambling to find someone who can run your broadcast, Mixing Station Anywhere is worth a serious look.
