Advanced Audio and Lighting recently completed a technical redesign at the 800-capacity worship sanctuary (and 100-capacity overflow room) of Third Reformed Church in the city of Pella, IA in a project headed by Martin Audio Wavefront Precision (WPS) arrays joined by supporting components.
“As so often happens, the existing system was a case of fine products having been installed but completely misapplied within the environment, so that coverage was extremely inconsistent,” explains Graeme Brown, president and senior design engineer at Peoria, IL-based Advanced, adding that the building’s unusual geometric provided challenges. “The space is quite unique — a modified fan-shaped building with lots of ceiling angles and a massive custom center truss that required outfills and delayed loudspeakers to evenly cover all seating.”
The new PA would not only need to address these issues but also have the capability of reinforcing a variety of events and source inputs. “While the church’s main focus is contemporary music, it does have a choir and mixed quartets on a regular basis for the early service,” Brown notes. “The client was requesting very hi-fidelity, with extended sub-bass, rather than necessarily high SPL.”
His design designates a main PA comprising the scalable resolution of the Wavefront Precision WPS compact line arrays, each with dual 8-inch LF drivers, 4 x 4-inch midrange drivers and 4 x 1-inch-exit HF compression horns. To this he added center flown SXC118 cardioid low-frequency enclosures, as well as a further SXH218 subwoofers on the floor for added sub-bass. Fill is provided by Martin Audio CDD series loudspeakers.
“The Wavefront system and SXC118, in conjunction with the DISPLAY 2 software and iKON DSP amplifiers, driving the system in 1-box resolution, provided optimum efficiency,” Brown states. “It gave us the best control over which areas of the sanctuary needed coverage and which needed avoided. Once properly configured—during the design phase—commissioning becomes greatly simplified; since the system handles the loudspeaker management on its own, the integrator can focus on aligning and tuning the room — and not ‘fixing’ the sound system.”
Achieving this optimization required a good deal of programming in the Martin Audio software, in particular using the Hard Avoid function. “There was initially some acoustic treatment in the space, more absorption was added during this phase,” he says. “With that and the multiple ceiling angles adding diffusion, the space is very well behaved, and the system performs extremely well in those conditions. It has much more gain before feedback, when compared with the previous system.”
The new system also meets requirements for weight loading and general aesthetics. “The original system was the typical ‘flying junkyard’, so popular at the time. It consisted entirely of front-loaded, point source powered enclosures, whereas the new system is based on line array technology and cardioid low frequency control,” Brown concludes. “Between the Martin Audio factory rigging hardware and the custom Polar Focus beam mounts, this was an extremely clean installation. Everything is high and tight. The clients were thrilled even before it was powered up.”
