First Baptist Church in Pearland, TX recently underwent an extensive facility upgrade to its sound reinforcement capabilities, a project under the direction of design/build firm DiTech AV (El Campo, TX) that utilizes a variety of loudspeakers from DAS Audio.
“First Baptist Church has an incredibly unique, 1,200-seat sanctuary that is contemporary in its design and is positively beautiful,” explains DiTech AV owner Paul Guthrie. “The overall width of the space is 150 feet with a depth of 140 feet. The stage runs the width of the room with a center 30-foot thrust that projects out in front of the stage area. Seating is fixed with a capacity for 1200 people and the congregation area has an incline, or rake, of 18 feet from front to rear. Services are a blended style of both traditional and contemporary but leaning more toward the contemporary side. There is both a praise band and an 8-member praise vocal team that provide a very uplifting worship experience.”
The new loudspeaker system deployed by Guthrie and his crew includes three DAS Audio Vantec-20A active curve sourced line array enclosures that are flown dead center—facing straight out into the room—directly above the stage thrust. There’s also a fourth Vantec-20A that serves as a center delay loudspeaker, positioned 70 feet back into the room.
Directly to the left and right of the center loudspeaker cluster, there are two flown clusters, with each hang consisting of five DAS Aero-12A powered line array elements. These two loudspeaker clusters are angled to face the left and right sides of the sanctuary. For low frequency support, the DiTech AV team deployed two DAS Audio Event-218A powered subwoofers. These two enclosures are positioned in the center area above the line array clusters and among the stage truss.
“Several factors led us to choose DAS,” Guthrie says. “Ultimately, speech intelligibility was a crucial concern, because without this, the message gets lost. We also wanted the system to be very musical and live sounding. We wanted the audience to not only hear the music, but to feel it as well and, in this regard, the DAS system really delivers. Further, the integrated rigging and hardware made the installation process go very smoothly. The entire installation is very clean in appearance and is not the least bit visually distracting.
“I like to use DAS because they make great products that sound amazing and will absolutely blow you away,” he concludes. “It’s easy to work with the company and they are always there to support you. I called Carlos Henao, the company’s U.S. Accounts Manager, told him what I was thinking and what I wanted to do, and he was right there when I needed him. For this project, we had a very tight window due to the end of the year and the holidays. Carlos went out of his way to make certain every aspect of the project was well taken care of.”
