Located in the northwest suburbs of Nashville, TN, Temple Church is a striking, angular building where music figures heavily in worship, now enhanced with a new sound reinforcement system headed up by Alcons Audio loudspeakers.
Services feature a gospel choir, full band, soloists and enthusiastic participation from the congregation, with a quality sound reinforcement system needed to help fill the large fan-shaped nave of the modern church.
Eddy Hobby of Nashville-based Prosonic AVL maintains the church AV systems and was looking for a system that could be aligned with precision while also being visually discreet. “Being in Nashville, the church has a lot of talented musicians and singers. The musical director has very high standards and quality bass was also really important,” he says. “They wanted great soun but it was also important that there were no sightline issues between the congregation and the video screens.”
Hobby was introduced to Alcons Audio systems by company representative Scott Hough of Griffith Sales, following up to to ask the company’s North America sales manager, David Rahn, for a demonstration. This was done on a Thursday evening when the band and choir do a full rehearsal, utilizing two Alcons LR16 compact line arrays to showcase sonic quality as well as how the loudspeakers could be aligned to cover the large, triangular space.
“The room is around 160 degrees wide, so getting the coverage right was crucial. At the same time, they still wanted a really big, immersive sound,” Rahn says. “Due to architectural and rigging challenges, the left and right arrays had to be flown close together, almost as a dual central cluster. Mitigating the interference between the two line arrays was also challenging. However, due to the precise accuracy of the cylindrical wavefront along, with a centrally deployed RR12 point source array module, the transitions were incredibly smooth, and the achieved coverage was optimal and precise.”
Subsequently, the church elected to go with a system almost identical to the demo rig. It incorporates six LR16 compact line array modules and one LR16B compact line array bass module per side, flown close to each other above the front center of the stage but angled outwards to cover the whole congregation. A single RR12 point source array module is flown between them, angled down for front fill, with a BQ211 compact subwoofer floor-mounted on each side of the stage. The system is powered and controlled by three Sentinel10 amplified loudspeaker controllers.
“We were all floored by the demo,” says Carlos Jarrett, chief sound engineer at Temple Church. “We had never experienced anything like that quality and coverage before. When the band and choir are in full voice there is a lot of sound coming from the stage, but the gain before feedback of the Alcons system was exceptional. We had no hesitation in specifying it for the church.”
