By providing impassioned services produced with high-quality technology, Willow Creek Community Church has become one of the largest and most popular churches in the country. Each week, Willow Creek offers an extensive schedule of worship opportunities across its 820,000-square-foot main campus and hosts tens of thousands of visitors among its eight locations. The church has always benefited from using some of the most advanced technology available to manage the campus’ complex multimedia infrastructure. To effectively control timing signals for its extensive Dante® network, Willow Creek turned to the capabilities of the Model 5401 Dante Master Clock from Studio Technologies, manufacturer of high-quality audio, video, and fiber-optic solutions.
Sherwood Baptist Church Replaces Three Separate Sound Reinforcement Systems with Danley
Located in the mid-sized city of Albany in southwest Georgia, Sherwood Baptist Church is well known for trailblazing new approaches. Its large campus gives the Albany community an immersive Christian experience: the Sherwood Christian Academy serves students in kindergarten through high school, and the church organizes and hosts plenty of community-wide activities, classes, and events beyond just the Sunday service. Recently, dB Integrations, of Gainesville, Georgia, updated the sound reinforcement systems in three of its spaces – the school gym, the school theater, and the church gym – using Danley Sound Labs loudspeakers and subwoofers for improved intelligibility and musical impact.
A Single Danley Genesis Horn Benefits Historic Cathedral Church of the Advent Both Sonically and Aesthetically
Founded only a few years after the city of Birmingham, Alabama itself was founded, Cathedral Church of the Advent is over 130-years-old and holds a place in the National Register of Historic Places. It is the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama and home to 4,000 congregants who fill its stunningly beautiful sanctuary for five services every weekend. Its music program has earned accolades, and the church has branched out to include a modern music ensemble for its last service on Sunday. Georgia-based A/V design and integration firm, dB Integrations, recently remedied Cathedral Church’s sonic woes with a single Danley GH-60 Genesis Horn loudspeaker, two Danley SM-60s for side fill, a Danley SBH-20 column loudspeaker for choir fill, and a Danley TH-118 subwoofer. In addition to delivering impactful, highly-intelligible music and speech reinforcement, the new Danley system performs without taking away from Cathedral Church’s amazing architecture, woodwork, and stained glass.
PreSonus’ WorxAudio Loudspeaker Technology Brings Message Clarity to Elevate Life Church
Under the leadership of Pastor Tim and Kristal Stair, Elevate Life Church (ELC) is a contemporary, non-denominational house of worship whose mission is to help guide worshippers as they encounter God, to embrace others, and to elevate their world. With contemporary services where music is an integral component of the worship experience, the ability of the congregation to experience every nuance of a performance while being able to clearly understand the message is crucial. This is precisely why the church recently invested in X2 line arrays and TL118SS subwoofers drawn from the WorxAudio catalog of PreSonus® Audio Electronics, Inc. (www.presonus.com) of Baton Rouge, LA. The equipment purchase was coordinated through Guitar Center Professional (http://www.guitarcenter.com/GC-Pro/).
Jeff Aldrich is the Executive Producer at the church’s Orange Park, FL location. Among his numerous responsibilities with the church, he is a production lead and student in ELC’s Elevate Leadership Academy, who are tasked with load in, setup, operation, and load out of the equipment for Sunday services, which take place at Orange Park High School. He discussed the challenges of building a mobile church each week.
Seattle Community Church Selects New NEXO and Yamaha Sound System
Bethany Community Church (BCC) Green Lake in Seattle, Washington established itself in the early 1900s and now has a weekly attendance of approximately 3,000 people across six physical campuses and one on-line.They moved to the Green Lake location in 1969, and in 2005 after outgrowing the building that had housed the church for 36 years, they began construction on a new state-of-the-art worship space that was completed in 2008.
This year the Green Lake location upgraded its sound system with a NEXO STM line array and Yamaha CL5 Digital Audio Console for its 600+ seat sanctuary thanks to the efforts of Morgan Sound of Lynnwood, WA.The campus has an average attendance of around 1,800 at their three main Sunday services.
In the summer 2017, Morgan Sound was contacted by Bart Brueck, the church technical director, to begin the process of looking at upgrading the sanctuary audio system at the main Green Lake campus. The contemporary worship service had progressed to the point that it was time to implement a new audio system and mixing infrastructure. Needs for higher SPL, multi-track recording, virtual soundcheck, new in-ear monitoring, and a separate streaming mixing system were urgent priorities.
Johns Creek United Methodist Church Upgrades to Danley SBH10 Column Loudspeakers
Since the completion of its expansive, 1,750-seat sanctuary in 2013, Johns Creek United Methodist Church has become a destination not only for its members, but also for the public at large. Its lush, long reverberation makes an ideal setting for musical performances of all types, from symphony orchestras to contemporary bands to solo concerts on its massive pipe organ. The church is part of what earned Johns Creek – a northeastern suburb of Atlanta, Georgia – its top-ten spot in USA Today’s 2017 “50 Best Cities to Live In.” Unfortunately, the sanctuary’s long reverb time also made for lousy intelligibility –that is, until dB Integrations, of Gainesville, Georgia, designed and installed a new Danley Sound Labs sound reinforcement system. Acoustician Tom Danley’s patented technologies allow Johns Creek UMC’s two Danley SBH10 column-form, point-source loudspeakers to deliver phase-coherent audio to the seats, with remarkably little energy splashed on the walls.
“The space itself is large: 150 feet wide by 100 feet deep, with a 40-foot balcony that spans the room,” explained Ronnie Stanford, director of sales and marketing at dB Integrations. “They had some column-form loudspeakers in there that had poor pattern control and not enough throw to make it to the back of the room. With an RT60 of 4.4 seconds and the poor pattern control of the existing loudspeakers the overall intelligibility in the room was extremely low. The church originally contacted us with the hope that we would treat the room acoustically. However, Danley’s steep pattern control can improve these kinds of situations by keeping energy off the walls and ceiling and thus reducing the reverb generated by the sound reinforcement system. So instead of messing with the acoustics, which would hurt the room’s musicality, I suggested instead that we explore replacing the sound reinforcement system with Danley boxes.”
Distributed Danley Nanos: A Unique, Cost-Effective Solution in a Highly-Reverberant (and Deeply Personal) Church
“This is the church that I grew up in and the church my mom attended till the day she died,” said Sid Gattis, speaking of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina. “It was built in the 1950s in Forest Acres, one of the oldest communities in Columbia, and it’s a stunning example of a liturgical church: big, old, tall pine ceiling, hard pews, hard floors… it’s just a hard space all around. I think they begrudgingly put some fuzzy stuff on the kneelers to spare some old joints, but that’s it. The sanctuary is beautiful, but also very challenging from the standpoint of intelligibility.” Gattis is the owner of Gattis Pro Audio, and he recently improved things at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields by installing a distributed system of Danley Sound Labs’ smallest loudspeaker and subwoofer: the Danley Nano and the Danley Nano Sub.
Gattis had installed the church’s previous system over twenty years ago, when he was just launching his new company. “We put in a big center cluster with a delay to cover the balcony halfway back,” he said. “It was a lot better than what they had previously been using, so that was okay, but it wasn’t ideal. Over the years, things failed and got replaced with pretty much whatever, until the church decided it was time for a refresh.” Gattis put together a proposal based on some previous experiences he had had with Danley Nanos. “The Nanos produce a way-bigger sound than seems possible from such a small box,” he said. “I thought if we distributed Nanos and painted them to match the wood, St. Martin’s would get intelligibility without compromising the aesthetic.” The church committee put in its due diligence and pressed the top three proposers for demos. Gattis obliged and won the job.
PreSonus® Audio Technology Brings Clarity of Message to Brooks United Methodist Church
Seeking to equip, encourage, empower, and impact its congregation for a meaningful worship experience, Brooks United Methodist Church (UMC) offers a comprehensive range of ministries to better engage its congregation. Guided by the Rev. Jason L. Robinson, the church recently opened its brand-new worship center. To ensure the congregation could hear clearly and enjoy the music, a capable sound reinforcement system was deemed essential. Ultimately, church management selected mixer and loudspeaker technology drawn from the catalog of PreSonus Audio Electronics (www.presonus.com) of Baton Rouge, LA.
SSP Custom Sound LLC of York, PA, a design / build AV integration and live sound production firm, was contracted to design and deploy the church’s new sound reinforcement system. After consulting with church officials, the decision was made to install PreSonus StudioLive RM32AI and RM16AI 32- and 16-channel rack mount digital mixers with Active Integration, cascaded through an AVB Network along with a PreSonus CS18AI Ethernet/AVB control surface. For loudspeakers, the SSP Custom Sound team deployed two PreSonus WorxAudio X3 all-in-one compact line arrays augmented by two PreSonus WorxAudio X115S high SPL subwoofers. Steven Pappas, owner, system designer, and audio engineer for SSP Custom Sound LLC, discussed the project.
Saddleback Church Upgrades Audio Consoles With Dual Yamaha RIVAGE PM10s at Lake Forest Campus
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PHOTO ID: FOH Engineer Connor Jenkins, ME Zac Gerig[/caption]
PHOTO ID: FOH Engineer Connor Jenkins, ME Zac Gerig[/caption]
Clark, a leading provider of innovative audio, video and lighting solutions with offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Dallas, recently installed two Yamaha RIVAGE PM10 Digital Audio Consoles at Saddleback Church in Lake Forrest, CA; one PM10 is used for front of house, the second for monitors.
“The church was looking for reliability, sound quality, increased channel counts and, of course, ease of use,” states Jeff Stewart, Senior Consulting/Client Development at Clark. “The client’s existing consoles were at capacity so we decided to look at the Yamaha PM10 for their requirements. We first learned about the new Yamaha PM10 through media announcements in various trade publications, and felt the RIVAGE would suit their needs. So we arranged several demonstrations for the staff, who were already familiar with Yamaha console technology.”
Danley Sound Labs SM100B and Tiny Nano Loudspeakers at Christ Center Church
Christ Center Church serves the mid-size town of West Columbia, South Carolina, which is both a destination-town and a commuter-town for the much larger city of Columbia, South Carolina. It’s …