Background:

Central Baptist Church moved from their downtown location to an office building on Highway 31 South, which they acquired and transformed into a worship space with a mostly volunteer work force in record time.  The leaders of Central Baptist embraced technology early on as a tool for the furtherance of the gospel.  Today their services can be viewed throughout Northern Alabama on a number of broadcast and local access cable TV stations. Essential Audio provided the sound system design and integration services for Central Baptist’s new worship center and youth room.  The biggest challenge facing the team at Central was only indirectly related to audio.  Namely, the room they planned on using for a worship space (used as a warehouse by the prior tenants) had concrete pillars in a grid pattern every twenty feet, which supported the two floors above.  Amazingly, the highly competent, mostly-volunteer team engineered, fabricated, and installed steel trusses, allowing for the removal of the concrete pillars, and thus providing for a nice open space conducive to assembling for worship. Essential Audio owner Ben Williams initially met with Central’s tech team while they were still holding services at the downtown location.  They had been in conversations with another vendor regarding the sound system for the new room.  This vendor was recommending a stereo line array from a popular manufacturer.  Upon receiving and reviewing a copy of the plans, Ben quickly identified a couple of problems with the other vendor’s proposal and recommended another solution.

Solution:

The worship space is a very wide and relatively shallow room.  Ben quickly determined that the geometry of the space did not lend itself to a stereo sound system as the benefit to the small percentage of seats that would receive the spacial effect from the stereo image did not justify the large percentage of seats that would suffer with poor coverage and localization.  Furthermore, given a short throw distance in the shallow room, a line array would not perform well.  Upon further review of the building plans as well as prediction models provided by the engineering department at Danley Sound Labs, Ben recommended a center array consisting of three DSL SH-50 loudspeakers, supplemented by two DSL TH-115 subwoofers for extended low frequency coverage.  The team at Central recognized the relative strengths of Essential Audio’s design and opted to go with it. Prior to their first meeting with Ben, Central’s tech team had already become interested in Roland’s new V-mixing system, specifically for its recall capabilities and the ability to digitally split the inputs using simple gigabit networking hardware and common category 5 cabling.  Ben was able to arrange for a demo of the M400, and the team was so impressed that they opted to purchase a V-mixing system for their main sanctuary, broadcast room, and youth room.  Overall the move has been a great success.

Update:

Central’s Tag Glenn, in a phone conversation with Ben, indicated that their church had hosted a youth event and that the artists opted to contract Sound and Lighting production from an outside vendor.  He reported that while the system was loud and the big stacks pumped out lots of low end, the line arrays did not cover the room evenly.  Tag additionally commented that he didn’t think the church members really knew what the Danley array was capable of, and that while physically much smaller than the rented line array system, he was confident the house system would have been fully capable of producing the necessary levels for the concert.