Bayside Church, Roseville, CA
A church known to many as the home to worship leader and musician Lincoln Brewster recently upgraded the loudspeakers at its 2,300-seat main campus sanctuary, under the direction of senior audio director Lee Fields. Components were provided by Special Events Services of Sacramento.
The former loudspeaker contingent, described by Fields as a “point and shoot” approach, has been replaced with line arrays made up of NEXO GEO S12 line arrays.
The system upgrade was made in conjunction with a seating reconfiguration in the room.
Specifically, the new main line arrays, flown left and right, are each comprised of nine GEO S12 modules in a gentle “J” configuration, distributing coverage up to the front rows.
Additional small arrays flown at the far sides of the stage extend coverage to the extreme regions of a coverage area that’s about 180 degrees wide.
Low-end energy is supplied by NEXO RS18 dual-18 subwoofers, with all loudspeakers driven/controlled via NXAmps.
“With the previous system, over half of the seating area would have been in coverage by delay speakers—not ideal with the worship experience we are trying to create,” Fields stage. “The NEXO line arrays have allowed us to cover the room much better from a single source, and every seat sounds amazing and surprisingly similar to the next.”
“We chose the NEXO GEO S12 because it was the best sounding box we tried,” adds Brewster. “It also happened to be the least expensive, and in my opinion, is the best value in line array systems today.”
The three other Bayside Church locations are using NEXO systems with NXAmps and Yamaha LS9 digital consoles.
Metro South Church, Taylor, MI
Located in the southern suburbs of greater Detroit, the sanctuary of Metro South Church Music is not a small space, measuring approximately 125 feet both wide and deep, topped by a 22-foot-high ceiling and seating about 850.
Music plays a vital role in worship services with the “Alive” praise band reaching out to hundreds of high school students.
A new left-center-right reinforcement system designed and installed at Metro Sound utilizes 15 D.A.S. Audio Aero 12A self-powered line array enclosures, with six elements each on the left and right hangs and a center fill cluster consisting of three modules.
“In order to deliver a high level of speech intelligibility and first-rate music reproduction capability, we determined that a line array system, augmented by multiple subwoofers, would be the most effective means of providing coverage,” states Paul Johnson, GC Pro account manager. “After coordinating three product demonstrations, the decision was made to go with the D.A.S. equipment.”
Low-frequency support is provided by a combination of two LX-215A self-powered band-pass subwoofers and eight LX-218CA self-powered subwoofers. “We stacked the subs on both sides of the stage, and this was done in a cardioid setup with some sub enclosures turned around in order to reduce standing bass on the stage,” Johnson adds.
The self-powered loudspeakers eliminated the need to house a rack of power amplifiers, and because the power is integral to the enclosures, it’s optimized for each loudspeaker model. And, each of the three loudspeaker clusters was able to run on a single 15-amp circuit, making it an efficient setup.
Support on the project was provided by GC sales associate Paul Long and D.A.S. Audio regional sales manager Steve Trimble. The company also dispatched systems specialist Ramon Franco to provide final tuning and optimization.