A new sound reinforcement system to enhance energetic musical worship services at the 450-seat auditorium of Australia’s Emerge Church, which features a full band of drums, bass guitar, electric and acoustic guitars, keyboards, and four to six vocalists, incorporates Powersoft T Series amplifiers.
Located in the North Brisbane region of Queensland, the Pentecostal Emerge Church has three locations, with its main facility in the suburb of Warner. The venue’s original PA system, installed in 2000 when the church opened, comprised four 12-inch point-source loudspeakers (two per side) and two 18-inch subwoofers under the stage.
“In recent years, we noticed that the system was sounding tired and lacking the definition required for clean and clear vocal reproduction,” says Ash Webber, one of the church’s head audio engineers. “Achieving even frequency and SPL coverage throughout the auditorium has always been a challenge, and at times this led to comments from the congregation that the audio mix was too loud in some seats while being too soft or lacking clarity in others.”
Emerge Church’s last annual conference provided an opportune time to audition prospective PA and amplifier options. (An earlier audio upgrade had seen the church purchase an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 console, with DM48 mix rack and Dante card, and four Electro-Voice EVU-2062 frontfill loudspeakers to augment the original PA system). For the conference, Harry Lloyd-Williams, founding director of Brisbane-based manufacturer AT Professional, provided the company’s TLA508 Blackbird line-array system with power supplied by Powersoft T Series amplifiers.
The primary criteria for an upgraded system were even and clean coverage throughout all seats, for both music and speech reinforcement, with church leadership endorsing the new components and approving them. The new loudspeaker set, tuned by Brendan Keane, adds eight AT Professional TLA508 line array cabinets (four per side), as well as two AT CLA LF3200 18-inch subwoofers beneath the stage. Both the new loudspeakers and the existing frontfills are powered by four 6,000-watt, four-channel Powersoft T604 amplifiers.
Further, all signal processing is done within the T604s, which have built-in loudspeaker DSP, while input signals are delivered via the onboard Dante capability. The T Series’ high voltage is also well suited for sharing power between the channels for applications such as bi-amped loudspeakers or subwoofers with passive tops.
“The new AT Professional PA system and Powersoft amplification combination has delivered our goal of even coverage and clear audio with exceptional results,” says fellow head audio engineer Rob Camilleri. “The new system has been well received by the church leadership, congregation, worship band, audio engineers and guest speakers, and delivered increased intelligibility, musical definition and headroom.
“We thoroughly recommend and endorse the Powersoft amplifier platform and AT Professional for their exceptional customer service and quality products.”
