When leaders of The Vineyard's congregation first sought out the help of Jeff Sanderson, the principal consultant and founder of Olympia, Washington-based Onpoint Designs, they came seeking a key that would unlock the "techno-handcuffs" they felt were inhibiting their worship services.
"The Vineyard is a rapidly growing church," Sanderson says, revealing a major factor influencing what turned into a successful collaboration between his firm and the congregation. "Prior to moving into the 1,100-seat sanctuary they call home now, they were in a very small space where not much could be done. It had a low ceiling and seated 500 or so. They wanted to change the look and feel of their services entirely with a theatrical stage offering rigging for curtains and props, and most importantly, a sound system that could manage everything from weekly services to national touring acts." Both tall and wide, The Vineyard's new Urbana, Ill. sanctuary is fan-shaped, measuring just about 150 feet across at the furthest point from the stage. After prescribing a series of acoustical treatments for the room designed to tame its inherent reverberance, Sanderson specified three arrays of QSC's WideLine loudspeakers for house sound reinforcement. The full-range Wide- Lines were suspended from three locations downstage of the proscenium in arrays of six enclosures each.
Prior to its installation, one of the biggest concerns the church expressed about the sound system centered around maintaining unobstructed sightlines throughout the sanctuary. Given the importance his client placed upon this issue, Sanderson elected not to use the sidefills that would usually be the norm to help conquer the extremely wide area of coverage.
Instead, drawing upon lessons learned while facing similar challenges during the development of an audio blueprint for a large outdoor stadium, Sanderson broadened the coverage of the house arrays themselves by supplanting traditional Left-Center-Right thinking with a Right-Left-Right design.
In order to fulfill his R-L-R vision, Sanderson effectively divided the room in half with his design, using its center aisle as the line of demarcation. Next he figured out a way to bypass the filtering in each of the WideLine enclosures within the center array, and produced a nominal LF pattern that stretched out evenly in both directions across the width of the entire array's pattern. Now made capable of providing left channel imagery to both halves of the room from the single center array, the rig called upon its dual right channels on either end to complete the stereo image.
"Situationally, the overall effect of this RL- R system isn't unlike listening to your car stereo," Sanderson explains. "Where you're seated all the way to the left within the field of coverage, yet still can discern the stereo imagery. Here in The Vineyard's sanctuary, even if you're sitting in the outer seats on the right or left side of the room, you'll still hear a L-R stereo image. True, we've decreased our overall area of stereo coverage, but we've increased the stereo saturation. This type of design certainly isn't right for all situations, but in those where budget, sight line concerns, and the width of the coverage area team up against you, it certainly is a viable option."
A pair of QSC's MD-S218 ModularDesign Series subwoofers are flown as part of each outer array; additional low-end grunt is also supplied by a trio of MD-L118 floor subs. Compact, low-profile frontfill is provided by three QSC AcousticDesign AD-82H loudspeakers.
Power for the main arrays and subs comes from a dozen CX Series CX1102 amplifiers, while the rig's configurable DSP takes shape with the help of a pair of QSC BASIS 922az processors. "You cannot do something like this without having multichannel control of each array, and obviously each array component," Sanderson points out. "When stereo signals from the mixing console are routed to loudspeaker arrays configured R-L-R, they don't just come out as a coherent wavefront on their own, there is definitely a degree of processing that must take place first."
A Yamaha DM2000V2 40-channel console was selected to handle mixing in the house, while patching and routing falls under the care of a Whirlwind E Snake system. Outfitted with perforated front doors, a pair of Lowell L278-61 racks house the main array amps.
"We wanted to keep the system package as compact as possible," Sanderson further notes, "as in new construction like this, every square foot costs money. The Lowell racks and CX amps allowed us to squeeze the available real estate for everything it was worth and keep our footprint lightweight and small. Using the perforated doors on the racks let us ventilate with natural airflow as well to maintain optimum temperatures."
Four Lowell power strips (two each of model U181RL and L188-IG) facilitated easy installation via a breakout box on top of each rack requiring only a single connection on-site to hook up to transformer balanced power conditioned on the front-end long before it ever got close to the gear.
Loaded and tested in Portland, Ore. prior to being shipped to Urbana, the racks were built by Delta Systems Integration, the firm that also managed the entire project build.
"In the end, what I believe makes the system stand out is its transparency," Sanderson adds. "Once we got our fingers into the processing and started massaging deeply, the sound took on an extremely natural depth. It doesn't offend you, but it will quickly capture your attention, and you feel you're listening to the music in its truest sense. While a R-L-R system may indeed be a bit unorthodox, everything I did was done in a simple fashion to minimize site time. Instead of spending money on labor, I like to spend it on technology. The results are always well worth it."
