Grace Point Church in Indianapolis is a thriving young church with an equally energetic and passionate youth ministry. For their annual winter youth rally last February, Cincinnati-based Access Audio and VUE Audiotechnik teamed up to provide the church a complete production solution that would deliver spoken word while offering enough horsepower for the enthusiastic young audience.
With everything from staging, lighting and power systems required at the offsite location, it was the audio challenges that were most obvious to Access Audio’s director of operations, Chris Knueven.
“The acoustic hurdles in this room were severe,” explains Knueven. “The main stage was located in a large 150 x 112-foot multi-purpose room that is essentially a gymnasium with a concrete floor and metal walls. With content that included everything from rock, to spoken word, reverb time and reflections were an obvious concern. In addition, structural limitations prevented flying the PA from the room’s ceiling, so we needed to bring in lifts as well.”
With coverage precision, intelligibility and easy rigging topping the list of “must haves” for the Grace Point event, Knueven wasted no time specifying VUE al-8 line array stems complete with companion al-8SB flyable subwoofers for low-frequency extension.
“VUE’s al-Class arrays provide excellent coverage and are very musical, especially in the mid-range,” explains Knueven. “Having both al-4s and al-8s in our shop allows us to create coherent arrays of almost any size, or break the system up into smaller PA’s as well. The system rigs really quickly and sounds great for both music and spoken word, all of which are critically important in the house of worship market.”
Knueven’s final design for Grace Point Church’s event included left and right al-8 arrays comprised of 6 elements each. VUE al-8SB subwoofers were ground stacked for low-frequency support. Power and processing for the arrays were supplied by the VUEDrive V6 and V4 series systems engines. At front of house, a Yamaha CL-5 handled the mix and was networked via Dante to a Lake LM-44 for overall system processing and routing. Main drivelines to the VUE racks were also over Dante, with connection to the amplifiers a combination of Dante and AES.
“We strive to always exceed our customer’s expectations, and we look for opportunities to go above and beyond with every job we take on,” concludes Knueven. “In this case, that opportunity was sending the VUE system instead of a smaller, powered constant curvature array that the client originally requested. The al-8 easily delivered on all fronts; from rigging to sound quality and coverage. We were very pleased.”
Ultimately though, the most important component of a successful event are happy customers, and in that measure, Knueven is proud to share a Google review written by Church leadership immediately following the festival.
“Access Audio worked with us to create an environment for 300 student and adult leaders to experience God! They listened and provided gear that matched our programming and expectations. The staff was awesome to work with and consistently over-delivered in both gear and service. I would highly recommend them and will use them anytime we have retreats in the Cincinnati area.”
