As a non-denominational Christian house of worship, Southgate Church offers its congregation a contemporary and expressive worship environment that takes full advantage of live music to help make its services a meaningful experience.
Backed by a praise band outfitted with keyboards, bass, guitars, drums, and a multi-person vocal ensemble, the worship services are vibrant and do a great job of getting the congregation engaged.
To reach the 400 – 500 worshippers with a high level of speech intelligibility and top-notch music reproduction capabilities, the sanctuary’s sound system was recently upgraded and now includes TrueLine line array technology from WorxAudio Technologies.
A family owned AV sales, rental, and installation firm with a wide range of conference, multipurpose, and church projects under its belt, St. Louis Audio Visual was selected to upgrade an aging system that had a number of coverage deficiencies and replace it with a new, more efficient loudspeaker setup capable of providing consistent sound quality throughout the space.
“Southgate Church’s sanctuary is approximately 40 feet deep and 60 feet wide,” explained Craig Breckenridge, VP of Sales for St. Louis Audio Visual Inc.
“The altar / stage area faces into the room’s width, so the sound system must cover an area that is considerably wider that it is long. This issue was further compounded by the fact that the ceiling height is quite low—barely thirteen feet—and that for music worship services, the client was looking to average 93 dB throughout the space.”
“In order to meet these requirements, it was critical that we find a loudspeaker system with extremely broad horizontal dispersion characteristics, and this was precisely what led us to deploy two WorxAudio TrueLine X3-P ‘all-in-one’ compact line array systems.”
The WorxAudio Technologies X3-P is a compact line array system incorporating three modules, each with a medium format, 1-inch exit compression driver and dual 8-inch cone transducers.
The system provides a total of three high frequency drivers and six bass drivers—all housed in a rugged enclosure with a custom, integrated rigging system and WorxAudio Technologies’ highly-regarded PMD-1.5 digital power amplifier.
“This sanctuary is, in many respects, a multipurpose area,” Breckenridge said. “The space has low pile carpeted floors and an acoustical tile ceiling. Padded, moveable movie theater style seating is typically arranged in a 160-degree fan that extends out from the stage area.”
“Each of the WorxAudio X3-P line arrays was positioned as close to the ceiling as we could manage—at a height of 12 feet using 1.5-inch NPT threaded extension pipes with a Chief CMA395 angled ceiling mount attached to each cabinet.”
“The two line arrays are positioned at the front edge of the stage area with about 15 feet of separation between the two enclosures.”
“The 15-inch horn cabinets previously installed were leaving voids in the coverage area and were alternately ‘killing’ people up front while delivering low intelligibility in the back of the room,” said Breckenridge.
“With their 35-degree vertical throw and broad 160-degree horizontal dispersion, the X3-P enclosures deliver a 50-foot coherent throw that perfectly matched this room’s requirements.”
“The entire room is within 3 db of the front row—even with a 13-foot ceiling. With the X3-P’s wide horizontal dispersion, we could have easily achieved excellent results with a single enclosure, but the client wanted to image the performances in stereo and I must say that the stereo imaging everywhere in this space is amazing!”
Said Chris Clausen, Southgate Church’s Music Minister, “We’ve all been very impressed with the new system’s horizontal coverage and the consistency of the sound pressure level throughout the room.”
“These new loudspeakers deliver a woody, detailed midrange for instruments such as acoustic guitar and voices sound clear and natural.”
“Equally notable, we have plenty of headroom to spare. With their amazing spread and detailed stereo imaging, I can envision us using these loudspeakers for an outside event.”
“We’ve been very pleased.”
