Peak City Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is a dynamic, contemporary Christian church experiencing a high level of growth. The church recently moved to a new location with room to expand its congregation, services, and community outreach and looked to LEA Professional to provide powerful amplification solutions to serve this growing community.
Peak City Church currently serves about 800 with a range of services, support groups, and classroom-based instruction for children and adults. As part of the Church’s plans to best address their current and future needs, managers reached out to AV systems integrator, Sight+Sound Technologies to design and install sound, lighting, and video systems that included a new distributed audio system for their lobby/cafe and common-space hallway area, and systems for their multi-use classrooms.
Kris Johnson, the Chief Operating Officer for Sight+Sound Technologies (SST), was one of the key project point people for the new Peak City Church sound system expansion. With its corporate headquarters in Colorado Springs, SST provides an array of professional AV services, including custom design and certified installation for new and remodel construction, acoustic room analysis, special event planning, and support, as well as equipment sales and rentals. SST has been an LEA Professional amplifier reseller and installer for the last couple of years and has placed LEA amps into a range of applications.
Johnson explained that Peak City Church wanted to provide intelligible, pleasing, clear and flexible audio support for their auxiliary spaces and classrooms. The common areas often carry the audio of services or other programs happening in the main auditorium, but they may also have background music, announcements, or their own audio as needed. The three multi-purpose classroom systems are primarily independent and are used to support group-specific programs or video support.
“We put in place five LEA Connect Series 704D, four-channel amplifiers — two supporting the distributed audio and three more amps, one in each of the classrooms. We did their whole distributed audio through the lobby and in the hallways with the LEA amps,” added Johnson. “All their sound systems are now on the same Dante network so that we can distribute the sound anywhere we want, which is a very nice growth feature for the church.”
The LEA Professional Connect Series 704D amplifier is a family of Dante-ready, IoT-enabled, professional-grade amplifiers perfectly suited for small to medium-scale installations. These two-, four-, and eight-channel amps feature direct HiZ (70V or 100V) or LoZ selectable by channel. With three ways to connect, installers can engage the built-in WiFi access point, connect to the venue’s WiFi, or use the FAST Ethernet to connect to any local area network via Cat5 or Cat6 cable. The Dante Connect Series also features analog inputs and Dante inputs and external I/O control for remote on/off and fault monitoring.
“The 704D is one of our favorite amps; we keep a couple of them on the shelf because they always come up as a great fit for projects,” said Johnson. “The wattage and features of the 704D are a good fit for the variety of different speaker systems we use. We’ve hooked LEA amps up with Martin Audio, EAW, BOSE, and other speaker brands, and we always get great-sounding results.”
In addition to sound quality and installation flexibility, the SST team continues to install LEA amps for their robust reliability and the excellent service and support they receive from LEA Professional.
“LEA is excellent to work with. Over the years, we’ve had just one amp we needed to ship back, and when I called them up to see if we could get an RA, they just said, ‘Yes, absolutely, let’s get you another amp, we’ll take a look at it.,” said Johnson. “As it turned out, the amp had trouble with some voltage spikes and dirty power going into it, so it wasn’t a fault of the amp, but LEA was great about it all and were very easy to work with.”
The Peak City Church distributed system is making full use of the DSP features of the 704D amps. With a built-in, 32-bit, 96kHz core DSP architecture, the Connect Series offers high-quality Routable Input Matrix, Crossovers, Parametric EQ, Output Delay, Limiting, and more. Johnson appreciates how the built-in DSP saves valuable rack space, weight, and system costs, as well as saves installation time. In addition, he has been impressed with the amp’s ability to connect through the LEA Cloud platform for remote service and support.
“It’s really refreshing to have a single-rack-space amp that has good power, and a lot of network features behind it, and all at a great price — other single-rack-space amp brands are just not very economical for us for most applications,” added Johnson. “LEA amps are feature-rich, rugged, and affordable; that’s what we love about it. We have a hotel project coming up, and we will most likely specify several LEA amps; I’m looking forward to working on that project and working more with LEA Professional.”
About LEA:
Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, LEA Professional was founded to provide dealer/integrators in the professional AV market with the highest-performing, best-connected amplifier technology possible. Privately held, LEA Professional is led by industry veterans with proven capabilities on the executive, engineering and channel aspects of professional AV. The company was founded in 2019 and is organized to be a major force in professional AV. Visit leaprofessional.com to learn more and follow LEA at facebook.com/leaprofessional, twitter.com/leaprofessional, Instagram.com/lea_professional and linkedin.com/company/lea-professional.
