Sunday services at East Sunshine Christian Church are all about singing along. The church’s contemporary worship style is based around four-part a capella harmonies, led by the group onstage and accompanied by anyone in the congregation who cares to join in.
East Sunshine’s 1500-seat sanctuary is big, bright, and welcoming, and Sunday services are well attended, but the church had struggled for some time with an inefficient sound system. As Worship Minister Randy Wray explained, poor sound and inconsistent coverage had an impact on the congregation. “We rely on people in the congregation being able to hear their part,” Wray said. “When it’s muddled and there’s no distinction, it’s very hard to sing and appreciate the four-part harmony.”
That all changed thanks to a major renovation of the sanctuary, including a new sound system featuring Renkus- Heinz ICONYX Gen5 digitally steered array loudspeakers, designed and installed by Sensory Integration AV of Springfield, MO. Sensory president Darren Smith said the room presented some interesting challenges.
“It’s a very wide room, with a 60-foot peak in the middle and a very large rear wall,” Smith said. “The previous system really didn’t provide the vocal intelligibility they needed, and coverage was very inconsistent. We’ve actually done multiple demos of different line arrays in this room, and could never really achieve the coverage we needed.”
“The best way to describe the old system was ‘muffled,’” Wray agreed. “There was really no intelligibility. It also really mattered where you sat—some people complained they couldn’t hear, and others said it was too loud.”
Sensory’s solution was to create a left-center-right system using a pair of IC Live ICLFR- N columns to the left and right of the stage and a dual IC2 array with two IC2-FR systems in the center, cut into the top of the proscenium. “The Iconyx beam steering gave us the ability to steer the sound away from the back walls, dramatically reducing reflections and increasing intelligibility. The L-C-R configuration also gave us excellent, consistent coverage— you can sit anywhere in the auditorium and get great sound.”
“With the previous system, we could actually get away with weaker singers onstage,” said Wray. “As soon as I heard the new system, my first thought was that we need to get better onstage, because people are going to hear everything.”
PRODUCT AT WORK
Renkus-Heinz ICONYX Gen5
With direct TCP/IP control using industry-standard communications protocols, the ICONYX Gen5 delivers a more than 200 percent increase in speed of operations.
renkus-heinz.com
from the wire
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