Although Free Chapel is a multi-site mega-church with weekly attendance approaching 12,000, it’s still got the neighborly feel of a much smaller church. With an eye toward community, parishioners at Free Chapel’s flagship Gainesville, Georgia location are excited about the church’s newly-constructed Chapel on McEver, which will serve as a dedicated wedding chapel. Purpose built, the Chapel on McEver is the ideal location for not just a wedding, but for a reception as well, with a nice mix of all-weather outbuildings and manicured grounds. Local A/V firm dB Integrations designed and installed a sound system for the Chapel on McEver and its outbuildings using Danley Sound Labs SBH-20 column form-factor, point-source loudspeakers, SM-100 synergy horns, weatherized GO-2-8CX loudspeakers, and TH-mini15 subwoofers.

“The Chapel on McEver is a beautiful setting for a wedding, but its aesthetic also makes for some challenging acoustic conditions,” explained Paul Lynch, inside sales associate at dB Integrations. “There’s imported marble tile everywhere plus lots of glass and highly reverberant wooden pews. To compound the challenge, the church put off some acoustical treatments we recommended while also requesting that the sound system be ‘invisible.’ They don’t want to see technology in the room. With very few places to even put a loudspeaker, Danley’s point-source fidelity and intelligibility were going to have to save the day.”

The architecture included niches in the decorative and structural support columns for column form-factor loudspeakers, so dB opted for Danley’s SBH “Skinny Big Horn” series. A Danley SBH-Series loudspeaker acts as a single point source (i.e. with no self-interference and thus no comb-filtering) while delivering a wide horizontal coverage pattern and a tight vertical pattern to keep energy off the ceiling and floor. When the recommended acoustic treatments were still on the table, the dB design team designed the system with four Danley SBH-20LF columns – the “LF” denoting additional low-frequency drivers. However, without the treatment, they revised the design to six Danley SBH-20 columns, four for the main floor and two for the balcony. The additional boxes serve as delays so as to minimize the distance between a given listener and a loudspeaker. Finally, two Danley TH-mini15 subwoofers contribute low-end warmth for musical playback.

The dB team used four weatherized Danley GO-2-8CX loudspeakers for an outdoor patio area that’s suitable as a pre-wedding hangout or as part of a post-wedding reception. The grounds also feature a “garage” area that is semi-indoor and outdoor. Four more Danley GO-2-8CXs cover the garage, with low-end support from another Danley TH-mini15 subwoofer. Finally, two Danley SM-100 Synergy Horn loudspeakers serve as a portable system. While expressly designed to provide coverage for a beautiful gazebo area, they can, in principle, be deployed anywhere they’re needed. Crown amplifiers power all of the Danley boxes, and a QSC Q-Sys DSP system provides comprehensive routing so that users can place any sound source in any area with minimal fuss.

“Danley fidelity is a big part of the Chapel on McEver,” Lynch concluded. “The sanctuary itself is far from perfect – not only is the room extremely reflective, but we couldn’t even angle the SBH-20s for ideal coverage. Nevertheless, it’s pretty darn good: listeners can understand what’s being said! With conventional column loudspeakers, things would be unacceptable. The outbuildings all benefit from Danley’s musical impact, as well.”