Situated on 143 acres in Shreveport, Lousiana, the new worship center for Word of God Ministries has a fan-shaped interior with approximately 1500 padded theater-style seats. The 125-feet deep room is composed of a raised stage facing a slightly raked main floor of concrete transitioning into a carpeted area of sharply raked “stadium-style” seating toward the back of the house. The 30-feet high sidewalls are sheetrocked but the black-painted insulation on the ceiling is exposed, which helps to mitigate overall reverberation.
When Gulf Coast Sound got the call for the Word of God project the sound system had already been bid by a different installer who was no longer involved. “We got the referral from our friends at Sound Productions in Dallas,” explains Larry Habetz, system installer at Golf Coast Sound. “We are dealers, but in this case Sound Productions was already selling the gear and they wanted us to install it.”
Habetz describes the church’s service as Contemporary Christian. “Some parts have a lot of heavy rock influence,” he says. “The church also plans on doing concerts in there, so they definitely need a rock-and-roll-capable system that gives them the ability to present a touring act without hiring an outside PA.”
“When I visited the site for the first time,” Habetz continues, “the structure was already built, and they were starting with the finish work on the inside. I asked the pastor, James McMenis, if he was wedded to the PA that had already been bid, and he asked what I would recommend. I told him that I would choose Electro-Voice, because while good-quality product is available from a number of sources these days, nobody else offers the level of service that we get from EV.”
No EASE modeling had been done to validate the existing system design, so Habetz asked for the CAD drawings. “I told the church that I might be able to get them a bid for an EV-based system in about a week,” Habetz says. “I sent off the drawings to Stu Schatz, one of EV’s in-house applications engineers, and Stu called me the very next day to tell me that the EASE model was waiting for me in my in-box. That meant that I was able to put a bid in the pastor McMenis’s hands that afternoon. He was blown away. He said that we were the first contractors on the entire construction project that had been able to turn things around like that for him. That definitely made an impression on him, and helped him make his decision.”
