Six weeks isn’t much time to go from an initial customer inquiry to having PA systems on-site and ready to rig.
However, when Pyxis Industries in Riverside, California was asked by North Coast Church to bid on the design and installation of sound systems at two different locations, owner Chad Costanzo didn’t hesitate.
“These installations had to come together extremely quickly,” Costanzo says.
“But our past experience with Electro-Voice gave us total confidence that everything would work out fine. And it did.”
The vendor that had originally been retained to design and install sound reinforcement systems for the sites had to pull out of the project only two months before opening day at both facilities.
Pyxis got the call from North Coast, and Costanzo went to work with systems engineer Alan DiCato, deciding how to handle the project within the church’s allocated budget.
While the previous provider had already specified designs based on products from a different supplier, Pyxis proposed using an Electro-Voice system instead. “EV has become our go-to manufacturer, because the installs we’ve done with their products have always sounded great right out of the box,” said Costanzo.
“And we also knew that EV and their local rep, Quantum Sales, would be able to assist us in making these tight timelines and staying within budget. Both factors were crucial, because, with that short of a time-frame, any issues we had would be a big problem for everyone.”
Pyxis had the two systems designed, priced, and approved within three weeks. “EV has such a broad line of different boxes that we were able to choose something that fit the application and the price point really well,” said DiCato.
The core elements of both systems are “exploded array” clusters drawn from Electro-Voice’s Xi-series. While the rooms are physically dissimilar — one is rectangular and the other more trapezoidal, and their ceilings are different heights — the clusters are identical except for the angles of the speakers.
“Line arrays would not have been a good choice for these rooms,” said DiCato says. “We didn’t have the ceiling height we would have needed, and in one of the rooms we had an odd shape to cover.”
“The exploded array design allowed us to angle the boxes in each room to get the coverage we needed, and also to use fewer boxes and fewer amps channels to get that coverage, which allowed us to stay within the customer’s budget.”
The clusters combine full-range Xi-1153A/64F three-way, 15-inch, medium-throw loudspeakers and Xi-122MHA/64F ultra-compact, high-output, two-way loudspeakers. “We use the 1153s for longer-throw coverage of the main seating area,” DiCato says, “and the 1122s for front fills and down fills.”
“The Xi boxes sound great without a lot of additional processing,” said Costanzo, “and they are very versatile, so they really cover the multiple uses that are planned for these rooms, from a Sunday church service, to a Friday night concert, to conferences and youth groups during the week.”
“And their waveform shaping gives them really good pattern control all the way down below 500 Hz. That allowed us to aim well and control our cutoffs precisely.”
