Nothing makes or breaks a worship experience like sound reinforcement. Faith communities depend on the clarity, intelligibility and inspiration carried through the audio infrastructure and delivered into the room by the speakers overhead.
Discover Church in Milwaukee has undergone several campus extensions since 1969, culminating in a major renovation last year, which included the sanctuary. Martin Audio partner Avenue Systems undertook a full AV makeover of the main worship area and video control room, installing new audio, lighting, video, control and acoustical systems for every aspect of the main auditorium’s AV. “This is the project that allowed for the installation of the new Martin Audio rig,” confirms David Price, Avenue Systems founder and CEO.
Explaining the requirement in more detail, Price confirmed that the PA would need sufficient versatility to reinforce typical modern worship, with full band, plus occasional choir and orchestra for special occasions in a room seating a little over 1800 congregants. “The church also conducts several special musical events throughout the year and hosts a smattering of professional Christian music artists and large conferences,” he added. It’s an example of the multi-purpose needs of many of today’s churches.
Martin Audio’s Wavefront Precision line array was deemed best fit for the portfolio of needs. A demo sealed the choice when the system was put to work in real life scenarios the church often encounters. “It provided the necessary output for the special event but using it over the weekend also displayed for them how well it performed even at lower levels for their regular weekend experience.”
Designed and optimized by the Avenue Systems technical team, the rig comprises: 16 flown WPS (eight per side) as a stereo main array; 16 flown WPM (eight per side) as outfill arrays for the raked seating; a pair of flown SXH218 cardioid subwoofer arrays (each with three SXH218 elements) and eight of the popular DD6 front fill speakers, stationed on the lip of the stage. Finally, a pair of Martin Audio LE200 wedges provide the pastor with reference monitor sound.
All arrays are powered by Martin Audio’s iKON multi-channel process amplifiers in the optimum 1-box resolution—iK81s assigned to the arrays/fills and iK42s to the subwoofer arrays.
Visualization and optimization were carried out by a combination of Martin Audio’s DISPLAY2 and 3 proprietary software, along with EASE. “The system performed incredibly well … virtually straight out of the box,” said Price. “We did adjust the optimization slightly to ‘hard avoid’ the balcony face, which added some additional clarity and minimized some odd reflections.”
Explaining his philosophy regarding room acoustics, he said, “The RT of the space was initially not bad—at roughly 1.75 seconds. The church did want to add some treatment to lower it to 1.5 or slightly less but didn’t want to lose the character of the space they had come to know. They are a ‘spirit-filled’ congregation and value the congregational participation. It was a factor knowing that they didn’t want to ‘over treat’ the room. I knew the optimization would be a great way to compensate for acoustical treatment by instead optimizing the coverage. Although this was an unusual-shaped room, the rig handled it beautifully.”
Located in Winterville, NC, Reimage Church recognizes that clean, clear, natural sounding audio is a crucial element in keeping their congregation engaged. As a result, the church recently upgraded their sound reinforcement system to better accommodate the challenges of contemporary worship services in an irregular, semicircular space. This resulted in one of the first deployments of Blaze Audio’s new Constant Curvature Array (CCA) loudspeakers.
Hi Tech Electronics, Inc. of Greenville. NC, a design / build AV integration firm was contracted to design and deploy the new sound system. Hi Tech Electronics President David Williams, who oversees sales, engineering, and installation of its various projects, discussed the challenges of the job.
“The sanctuary at Reimage Church is a large, semicircular space with seating accommodations for 1,200 people,” Williams explained. “The edge of the stage faces directly into the arch of the room, which measures approximately 75 feet from the stage edge to the rear wall. This design can easily create considerable challenges for having consistent sounding audio throughout the entire space—particularly on the extreme left and right sides. This is precisely why loudspeakers with wide horizontal dispersion in addition to well-focused vertical throw were so important, and this was a key factor that led us to deploy the Blaze Audio CCA Series.”
The new Blaze Audio CCA10i is a compact, 3-way arrayable point source loudspeaker designed for medium-sized venues to large distributed systems that need a flexible, scalable loudspeaker solution. Mounted horizontally with tight acoustic centers to minimize comb filtering, each CCA10i enclosure provides a fixed 20-degree vertical coverage pattern and can be flown with additional enclosures in vertical arrays. The system’s constant curvature waveguide provides unprecedented array coherence along with precision 160-degree symmetrical horizontal pattern control.
“The installation includes three hangs—each with three Blaze Audio CCA10i-BA-B enclosures,” Williams reports. “The center cluster faces straight out toward the rear center of the room while the left and right arrays face into the mid area of the left and right sides. All three clusters are positioned directly over the front edge of the stage area. DSP (Digital Signal Processing) is handled by two Symetrix Prism units: the 8 X 8 and 16 X 16 models. Power amplification is provided by six Blaze Audio PowerZone Connect 3004 full-matrix DSP-enabled Class-D power amplifiers. There are 2 amps per hang point, mounted with a custom bracket that holds the amps on the back of the loudspeaker enclosures.”
“I should also point out that we retained 8 WorxAudio UW18BP subwoofers that we installed with the original system back in the 90s,” Williams added. “Like the new Blaze Audio loudspeakers, the WorxAudio sub bass enclosures were also designed by Hugh Sarvis, and this was a key factor that enabled us to retain the subwoofers and mate them with the new CCA enclosures. They all originated with the same loudspeaker engineer. It’s also my understanding that the WorxAudio designs are now the intellectual property of Blaze Audio.”
Williams praises clarity and pattern control, intelligibility, and natural sounding music reproduction, plus the small footprint requiring fewer boxes than before and less intrusion on sight lines.
When 156 people gathered together at Redmond, Washington’s Louisa May Alcott Elementary School in November of 1989 to first worship together, little did they know that their grassroots efforts to reach their neighbors would lead to what is today a vibrant, multi-campus community of faith known as Timberlake Church. It also led to a beautiful building with sound-challenging architecture. This past March, the church’s flagship location in Redmond received a sound upgrade with a new L-Acoustics Kara IIi professional audio system flown in its 1,200-seat auditorium by Colorado-based HOW integrator Summit Integrated Systems.
“The challenge for fan-shaped auditoriums like this is getting both consistent impact and coverage,” explains Summit Project Manager Andrew Starke. “There’s a tendency to trade punch for coverage in situations like this, but we didn’t want to do that because the church’s worship style really called for impact.”
The previous PA system dates back to the turn of the century. “The sound in the room tended to be a bit harsh, and coverage was spotty, so those were the main challenges we needed to address,” explains Timberlake Church Production and Technical Director Ben Graf, also a longtime pro-AV veteran in the Seattle area, “We were looking for heightened audio and coverage quality, but we were also looking to achieve a new level of impact.”
Once a tour of some recent L-Acoustics church installation projects had convinced Timberlake Church’s committee that this was the way to go, Summit’s design team made critical choices: they decided on a combination of six center-hung KS21i subs, flown as adjacent three-enclosure hangs in an omni configuration, with another six groundbased KS21i subs deployed in an arc under the stage. “That gave us the impact we needed, both on the floor and in the balcony, letting us dial in exactly the amount of punch needed for each,” says Starke.
The new sound system’s main arrays comprise eight Kara IIi per side, with four A15i per side— three Focus over one Wide—for out-fill arrays, a combination chosen for consistency across the room. “The Kara IIi and A15i compression drivers and voicing are very similar,” says Starke. “With L-Acoustics, there’s a predictable consistency from one box type to the next, letting us mix the boxes as needed, knowing we’ll have uniformity across the entire system. We can pick the boxes based on the coverage the room needs while still achieving impact in every location.”
And finally, they chose three of the new LA7.16i amplified controllers to achieve consistent FIR responses across all of the main speakers, with a pair of LA12X for the subs. “We were able to get all the power we needed, where we needed it, with fewer amplifiers, which saved us budget while also increasing our resolution,” he says. “That was a huge win for the church.
“We wanted people worshiping here to feel the services as much as hear them,” adds Timberlake’s Graf.
Based in the north Minneapolis suburb of Centerville, Eagle Brook Church is a continuously expanding Baptist megachurch. Hosting a weekly audience averaging 20,000, plus another 25,000 online, the church places high importance on its sound quality, evidenced by its music ministry having its own Spotify channel and a previous “rider-ready” touring-class sound system in its worship space. For Eagle Brook, having a common sonic signature for all its locations was the key challenge.
The church has upgraded the sound systems in five of its eleven locations with various L-Acoustics A10, A15i, and K3i systems. “They wanted sonic consistency from campus to campus,” says Deron Yevoli, Director of Projects and Engineering at Summit. “Having the same sonic signature that lets you know you are in an Eagle Brook church,” he says. The consistent tonality across the L-Acoustics range worked across the campuses regardless of whether they need mid- or large-scale systems.
For instance, Yevoli points out that the A10 system was a perfect fit for Ham Lake’s relatively small— approximately 60 feet from end to end—flat-floored building. The Woodbury location’s 1,600 raked seats are more than well-filled by the larger K3i system, yet they share a wonderfully consistent sonic timbre.
“And the church’s very tech-savvy Production Systems Engineer, Matt Beckstrom, really loves to dig deep into the digital insides of a system, which L-Acoustics’ collaborative tools like Soundvision and its Autofilter feature let us do, to achieve consistent SPL throughout all of the locations,” Yevoli adds.
“For example, Autofilter’s frequency range, which had been focused on upper frequencies, has been extended downward, which really helps analyze and optimize for a wider range of spaces and designs,” Beckstrom explains. “And Soundvision has become invaluable to us, allowing us to predict how the sound will play in any corner of a space.”
Beckstrom also says he’s made extensive use of L-Acoustics Panflex technology, which provides sound designers like him with quick access to a choice of four horizontal directivity patterns: 70° or 110° symmetrical, or 90° asymmetrical on either side. “The asymmetrical capability, in particular, is amazing,” he says. “There have been times we’ve had to make design adjustments even during the installation phase of a project, so having that level of flexibility is huge.”
