A view of the sanctuary

Loud & Clear of Cincinnati reports that it recently put the finishing touches on a full audio system retrofit for the main sanctuary at Bethany World Prayer Center’s north campus. Located in the Baton Rouge suburb of Baker, the 6,500-seat hemispherical auditorium now has an L-ACOUSTICS loudspeaker setup as part of the project.

The system’s primary reinforcement is provided by four small line arrays each comprised of seven dV-DOSC cabinets painted white to blend in with the room’s décor. The two upstage hangs are flown in a traditional L-R arrangement while the downstage left and right hangs are respectively fed right and left signals, ultimately delivering a stereo image to nearly every seat in the house.

For downfill, ten 112XT cabinets are suspended from a catwalk above the outer perimeter of the stage, while a ring of a dozen MTD108a enclosures is employed to address the acoustically shadowed seating areas at the back of the room.

The ring of ten 112XT cabinets hung above the stage

Loud & Clear further installed ten dV-SUBs up on the catwalk as well as four SB118s inconspicuously mounted under the stage lip, two per side, to provide the room’s low-end impact. In a similar approach to keep the stage area visually clean, a total of 16 MTD115b monitor wedges are recessed under the stage floor in custom cradles firing up through grates.

Loud & Clear President Bill Deavers considers L-ACOUSTICS loudspeakers to be an integral component of his success in recent years. “We realize that there are still applications for spherical PAs, but when we get into larger applications like Bethany, the line array approach is simply the obvious answer,” he says. “Its coherent waveform is a major step forward in dramatically increasing the intelligibility of both the spoken and sung word to every set of ears in the house, which is really what our job is all about.”

Bethany World Prayer Center is unique in that it is one of the very first houses of worship to install L-ACOUSTICS’ new 112XT coaxial loudspeaker.

Bill Morgan, Bethany’s house engineer and audio supervisor, is equally pleased with the new system. “I really love the rig,” he says. “It’s both smooth and ‘in-your-face’. I’ll fire up the system – whether it’s with a CD or the praise team performing – close my eyes and it sounds like the source is right in front of my nose anywhere in the house.”

Deavers adds, “There’s variance of only plus or minus two dB throughout the entire room, which is much better than the previous system. Plus, the L-ACOUSTICS boxes are far less obtrusive than our previous ones. We painted almost everything white and the system simply disappears. The congregation is totally absorbed in sound and it’s hard for them to tell where it’s coming from. It’s beautiful. This was truly a blessed install.”

For more info go to http://www.l-acoustics-us.com