A sound reinforcement system serving the new worship space of Northside Baptist Church in Huntsville, TX marks the first U.S. installation of TW AUDiO ELLA compact line arrays, joined by the company’s VERA S32i cardioid subwoofers.
Bob Slie, Youth Pastor at the church, first experienced ELLA as part of an early demonstration of the technology at the WFX Show in Orlando. At the time, church leadership had become frustrated by its search for a sound system, with providers suggesting options that Slie and his colleagues felt would prove inadequate.
ELLA combines the slim form factor of a column with the added flexibility of a line array, plus built-in passive cardioid technology. Each ELLA6 unit combines a custom-designed waveguide with five 1-inch dome tweeters matched with a custom 6.5-inch driver.
The new Northside Baptist Church utilizes 22 ELLA6 elements supported by six VERA S32i subs. These are configured in two hangs of eight ELLA6 as the main left and right arrays, with a further hang of two ELLA6 as the center-fill plus two further arrays of ELLA6 to provide left and right out fill. Low end support is courtesy of a central cluster of three pairs of VERA S32i, while power is delivered by five Powersoft Quattrocanali 8804 Dante + DSP amplifiers using dedicated TW AUDiO presets.
“ELLA is the ideal solution for the space,” says TW AUDiO’s Mick Whelan. “The system performance has to be heard to be believed – the coverage is completely uniform throughout the listening area with zero phasing anomalies as you move left to right or front to back. Also, the passive cardioid topology of the ELLA6 and cardioid design of the subwoofer cluster delivers a very quiet stage area, so much so that the musicians had to adapt to their new environment! They were used to hearing so much sound spillover onto the stage that it was a new experience for them to have a properly controlled space. Of course that’s a joy for any monitor or front of house engineer working with lots of open mics.”
The installation was supported and managed by local AV systems integrator Arrendell Media under the direction of owner Brian Arrendell. “We really are very proud to have brought ELLA to the United States with such an impressive project,” Whelan concludes. “Northside Baptist Church needs to be heard to be appreciated, it’s a wonderful space.”