The band Jesus Culture recently sponsored a Conference on the campus of University of California Davis where, throughout the weekend, attendees heard from significant church and worship leaders. The Sacramento …
Founded in 1824, First Presbyterian Church of Greensboro, North Carolina serves a congregation of over 2,700, with 3 pastors and a staff of 40. Its beautiful, historic sanctuary, built in 1928, seats 1,560 and features an organ with more than 6,800 pipes.
In 2012, the church embarked on a $15 million renovation to its sanctuary and an adjoining building, including a major upgrade to the sanctuary sound system. For the A/V upgrade, First Presbyterian called on systems integrator Audio & Light of Greensboro and system designer Curtis Kasefang of Theatre Consultants Collaborative, based in Chapel Hill, NC. The renovation took two years to complete; the first post-renovation service was held Sunday, December 21, 2014.
Designed in the Southern French Gothic style, the sanctuary is in the traditional form of a cross. It presents a 160-foot-long center aisle and an 85-foot ceiling with lots of angles, as well as dual lofts with pews, a rear balcony that is 33 feet above the floor, multiple alcoves, a pair of 64-foot-long transepts, and plenty of glass and hard surfaces. The choir sits in pews that are perpendicular between the pulpit and lectern areas. The room is stunning but the acoustics are complex.
As Black Rock Church in Fairfield, Connecticut, was developing its new facility, church leadership turned to integrator AE Global Media for audio, video and lighting solutions. The new space is …
With its new steerable Meyer Sound CAL™ column array loudspeakers, Trinity Lutheran Church in Spring, Tex. has discovered a whole new level of speech and music clarity never heard before in its highly reverberant 1,400-seat sanctuary.
“The clarity with CAL is immaculate,” says Patrick Blake, director of worship arts at the church. “The tonality and musicality of the band are delivered to the entire congregation. Our band had evolved over the years from acoustic to electric with a full drum kit, and it was a constant struggle to hear. It’s night and day with CAL. An elderly congregant told me that he could turn off his hearing aid because he didn’t need it in here anymore.”
Originally designed for unamplified organ and choral music, the sanctuary features curved ceiling and marble floors that contribute to an RT60 upwards of 3.3 seconds, while its hard surfaces add to undesired echoes. With CAL, the church is able to control system coverage by directing audio energy only to congregants.
The worlds of house of worship and music are closely linked, with an enormous amount of work going into making a church the kind of environment suitable for music while delivering the message. These were the primary concerns of Alfred “Al-Tee” Williams, a leading live-sound engineer whose front-of-house and monitor mixing credits include Jay Sean, Kool & the Gang, Fantasia and most recently, Ludacris. It was while mixing front-of-house for Ludacris last year at premier music venue Park City Live during the annual Sundance Film Festival that Al-Tee first encountered the RoomMatch® loudspeaker system from Bose® Professional. As soon as he experienced it, he knew it was the right solution for his church, the 129-year-old Fairfield Baptist Church, in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, where music is an integral part of the worship service led by Pastor Micheal Benton. “We were having a lot of trouble getting good coverage to all of the seats, and the low-frequency response we were getting from the existing system was just not what we needed,” Al-Tee explains.
At the Park City Live shows he did with Ludacris, Al-Tee was consistently impressed. “During sound check, I walked all around the main floor then up to the balcony VIP sections – I was amazed at how good the coverage was in all areas – very smooth everywhere. But the real test came when I played some tracks for sound check that contained some really deep bass parts. The Ludacris song ‘How Low’ has a drop-tone that goes below 30 Hz, and many subwoofers just cannot handle this at the sound levels we need. I was blown away by the low-bass depth and impact that the RoomMatch subwoofers provided. I wanted the church to sound like this.”
The services at Lighthouse Evangelism Woodlands in Singapore are being heard in a new light thanks to the addition of two SSL Live. L500 consoles, one for its front of house duties and the other for monitors mixes. As Lighthouse Evangelism’s sister location in Tampines is home to a Duality equipped recording studio, the choice of SSL for the sound system at the Woodlands venue was a natural progression.
With the help of SSL’s Singapore office, the two L500 consoles were delivered and installed by Managing Director Chan Kheng Wah and Live Marketing Manager Dominic Koh, who also facilitated the sale and are coordinating local training and support. The SSL consoles were chosen to replace Woodlands’ previous consoles and have delivered a significant sonic improvement.
“The difference between the previous consoles and the SSL L500s is like night and day,” says Rhey Ruiz, Head of Sound for Lighthouse Evangelism. “The microphone preamplifiers are amazing. We can hear so much more of our instrumentation, which has really contributed to the enjoyment and fulfillment that the congregation experiences at each service. What’s more, we record all of our services to multi-track, and the integration of the recording capabilities has been perfect. We can record directly from the microphone to the recorder without any filtering, which is something we were not able to do in the past.”
St. Andrew Lutheran Church, located just outside of Twin Cities, Minnesota, started its congregation in 1975 with just 200 members. Currently situated in a massive and aesthetically spectacular facility, the church now has membership in excess of 6,000 people, making it one of the largest Lutheran churches in the U.S. During the fall of last year, the church called on Twin Cities Sound looking for a complete redesign of its sound system, including acoustical work, video and lighting elements. To help resolve power and intelligibility issues, Twin Cities Sound chose to incorporate Powersoft amplification to drive the entirely redesigned audio system.
While the interior sanctuary was aesthetically striking, the church staff cited intelligibility issues with the previous audio system, saying that congregants found it difficult to hear and understand pastor’s message each week. “When we went into there originally, the complaint was that nobody could understand what was being said,” says Brandon Levy, Manager of Twin Cities Sound. “It wasn’t a power or a volume issue, it was that nothing was intelligible whatsoever. Even when it was really loud, the congregation couldn’t understand the content sufficiently.” Levy and his crew created an entirely new system design for the facility, starting with taming the acoustic environment and then reorienting the sound system from a multiple point-source system to a predominantly center cluster system.
Back in 2008, FreedomHouse Church began with seven people on a mission to bring hope and change their world one life at a time — with an inspiring Christian message built on principles of excellence, honor and commitment. Six years later, with a dynamic young pastor whose vision was to create a church people want to come to, FreedomHouse’s congregation has grown to just under 1,000 — mostly under 30 years old and reflecting nearly every ethnicity and background. At the center of FreedomHouse’s media production toolkit is a new Zen Studio multi-channel interface, from Antelope Audio.
FreedomHouse Church, which recently acquired its own dedicated sanctuary space, has been ‘mobile’ for six years — renting high school auditoriums, movie theaters and commercial buildings each Wednesday and Sunday. The church’s production team consists of over 25 volunteers, part of 175 total volunteers who serve throughout its different ministries.
The church’s use of technology helps create an atmosphere conducive to worship: “I have always felt that if you want to do something, you should do it well,” says Omar Reyna, Music Director, FreedomHouse Church. “This meant being intentional and inventive about when and how we use the technology. Since we acquired it a couple months ago, the Antelope Zen Studio has become an integral component in our pursuit of excellence in many different areas.”
Christmas services this past December never sounded better at Second Baptist Church’s 400,000-square-foot West Campus in Houston thanks to a recent audio system upgrade to two DiGiCo SD5 consoles. Installed by local HOW systems integrator Covenant Communications, the new consoles replace a pair of legacy DiGiCo D5 Live FOH and monitor desks for the church’s 5,000-seat “in-the-round” worship center, which also televises its lively services.
Second Baptist Global Tech Director Mark Sepulveda notes that after seven years of duty, the time had come to retire the previous consoles and make an upgrade. “The SD5s were chosen based on what our team thought were the best overall live audio consoles on the market that continued to give us superior audio with the DiGiCo brand, continued ease of hands-on functionality, easy firmware updates that will continue to add new features in the coming years, and the ability of the SD software to integrate with Waves SoundGrid for a seamless plug-in experience,” he says.
Covenant Communications has largely handled Second Baptist’s audio/video/lighting needs for the past four years, and the eventual upgrade choice came after considering various options. “I put a few things in front of Mark,” notes Joe Smart, Covenant’s sales manager. “Our role is to be objective; it’s not an emotional decision, but one to find the best solutions for them.” The SD5’s flexibility was perfectly suited for the church’s typical need for a quick “flip around to different worship styles” – from traditional to high-energy contemporary sound – and “recording audio for future TV broadcast,” notes Smart.
Smart points out that Second Baptist required more than the 128 inputs processed by its previous system: “The new spec required close to 160 inputs, no doubt in part to accommodate the fairly large band, including 12 to 15 rhythm players and 20 to 30 string players. That doesn’t include the enormous choir of up to 180 singers, 24 of those members being wirelessly close-miked and processed for a massive choir sound.”
After the environmental projection system in Current – A Christian Church started to lose its color and strength, an upgrade was in order. Current’s Worship and Creative Arts Pastor Evan Schwartz chose the CP-WX8265 for higher brightness and a picture that would “pop.”
“There are two Hitachi CP-WX8265 projectors mounted to the ceiling and they shoot on each side of our platform in the front,” explains Schwartz. “They are in our main auditorium which seats about 525 at one time.” The projectors are used for both graphics and live video during services.
There were multiple factors in choosing projectors that would fit the needs of the church. “We chose the CP-WX8265 because it was a great HD projector to upgrade to without a huge bill to pay,” said Schwartz. “It was a much-needed upgrade from our SD projectors. You get quite the bang for your buck. These projectors can fill the entire room.”
Finding a projector that was easy to use was also a key factor in the decision. “The projectors are very versatile. It is very easy to use the Perfect Fit feature and the lens shift to get the projector right where you need it to be.” Schwartz also notes the projector’s ease of use does not compromise the quality of the projection.
The benefits the CP-WX8265 projectors have had on Current’s services have been multiple. “There are too many benefits to name,” says Schwartz. “We upgraded our lumen power by twice the amount, threw the signal less than twice the distance, went from SD to HD and made it much more clear to see what we want people to see. When people walk into our facility, we want them to feel like they are walking into the presence of God. These projectors help us do exactly that by giving people a clear visual of what we’re presenting.”
