Amazing arrays
Based on the room shape, size, and budget, the core of the system is 22 XLD281 compact three-way full-range line-array elements in two hangs of 11 each.
“The XLDs are compact, with excellent rigging, and they sound amazing with EV’s FIR filtering,” Habetz says. “Using line arrays helped us keep the sound energy off of the walls. When Stu did the modeling, it turned out that XLD arrays gave us excellent coverage from front to back.”
“No hotspots or cold spots, just an even smooth pattern across the seating area. We have each hang configured as three independent zones: top, middle, and bottom, so we can shade them as needed to account for differences between the main floor and the stadium seating areas.”
Complementing the XLDs on the low end is a set of eight XLC215 high-output dual-15-inch line-array subwoofers.
“XLC is what we’ve built our business on,” Habetz says. “We own 60 of the XLC127s and 40 of the XLC118s. We use them in multiple applications, and the ease of rigging is phenomenal. I like the 215s because they’ve got a nice tight punch on the low end and also a lot of output; they’re very efficient.”
“In the EASE model,” Habetz adds, “the XLC215s were designed as two arrays of four each flown off of the truss in the center of the room. But there is an elevated baptismal, almost like a second story, and if we had hung that big hunk of subwoofers as planned it would have completely killed the sightline for the baptismal. So we turned the subwoofers upside down in a four-wide, two-high configuration, connected the fly-ware to a piece of half-inch aluminum angle-iron, and bolted that to the top of the truss. That way the subs are out of sight above the truss, almost touching the ceiling.”
The system was rounded out with 10 EVF-1122S two-way full-range loudspeakers. “The 1122 is a phenomenal box, a nice compact package with easy rigging,” Habetz says. “We used six of them for a delay ring. The XLDs did a great job of covering the back of the room without any help, but because of the church setting we opted to put in a delay line so that even at very low volume we were providing high-end presence and vocal intelligibility to the rear.”
The remaining EVFs are used for front-fill. “Because of the location of the truss we could not bend the array enough to cover the front seats,” Habetz says. “So we have four of the 1122s on the truss pointed down onto key areas at the front, which gives us a real nice smooth even pattern. All of the EV speaker lines, from Tour X on up to X-Line, are voiced very similarly, so any time you combine different boxes it doesn’t take much DSP work to make it all sound good together.”