Sven Pro Sound installed a state-of-the-art d&b audiotechnik sound system in Eastbrook Church/Academy’s multipurpose room/gym fulfilling the need for a top-of-the-line sound system that is easy to use.
When Eastbrook Church A/V Director Brady Garrison contacted Sven Pro Sound to come up with a solution for their eight year-old multipurpose room/gym sound system, Isaac Svien of Sven Pro Sound knew that it would not be an easy task.
The system consisted of sixteen name-brand speakers in numerous zones, a large rack of ten amplifiers, a zone processor and a portable mixer for use when the wall mount inputs weren’t sufficient. Some acoustical treatment was installed in the room.
Unfortunately, the system was difficult to use and unintelligible with speech and music. Moreover, the circuit breaker continually tripped under very light use because of the amount of amplifiers being used. Because of these problems, the system had not been used and portable systems had been set up for events in the room. All in all, the system was a headache for the church and school and needed to be completely replaced.
The church and school leadership considered adding major acoustical treatment to the room to reduce the echo but Isaac encouraged them to wait until the sound system was addressed. Brady and Isaac agreed that fewer highly directional speakers pointing across the room was essential to avoid reverberation off the walls and to control the sound better. d&b audiotechnik’s product line was the clear choice due to its superb sound and directionality using minimal power.
The system would be used not only for speech but for live music youth nights and recorded dance and rap music at basketball games. After running D&B’s ArrayCalc software to predict coverage and SPL levels in the room, the perfect solution was a pair of d&b audiotechnik E12 speakers mounted horizontally at precise angles powered by a single d&b audiotechnik D6 amplifier. This design ensured the speakers’ dispersion pattern was not hitting any of the walls and was only directed to the floor and bleachers. After Sven Pro Sound, along with Brady Garrison’s assistance, demonstrated the proposed d&b audiotechnik system to church leadership in the room, the choice was clear and immediately that week the old system began to be dismantled.
Sven Pro Sound worked with Eastbrook Church to trade-in their existing, obsolete system. The trade-in had enough value that the client didn’t spend any money on the new d&b audiotechnik system. The system was installed by Brady Garrison and tuned using d&b’s remote software to reduced the reverberation even further. The end result was stunning with the room now often preferred over the church’s main hall for events.
Not only did the new system sound better fulfilling the first goal, but also was much easier to use. A temporary Allen & Heath MixWizard2 that splits the two sides of the room into separate zones using left/right panning replaced the processor. Later, the mixer will be repurposed to another room on the church’s campus and replaced by a Behringer X32 RACK rack-mounted mixer with the ability to be controlled wirelessly via an iPad.
For ease of use, an Apple Airport Express is used as an input for wireless music playback and two Sennheiser EW135G3 microphones are available as well as various Sennheiser wired microphones. This approach allows the system to be controlled and used wirelessly and remotely from the equipment rack from anywhere in the room.
“This system is state-of-the-art and is extremely flexible and powerful for our church and school. I’m very happy with how the system has turned out. It is a night-and-day difference from the old system to this new system”, Brady says.
