One modern church gets maximum sound for a minimal cost.
When the members of the Rolling Hills Christian Church started to discuss a multipurpose room built with top-notch audio and video gear to help them reach out to the community, Mark Thompson, principal of Clarity Audio Systems, was tapped for his expertise.
“They have a very contemporary worship style, and they wanted to be able to fully support everything they do in their services,” Thompson said, explaining the church’s goals. “In addition, they didn’t want to have to bring in outside audio for touring groups. Plus, they wanted the space to be available as a community center.”
Kirt Shearer, who started the project with the Clarity team before being hired as the church’s tech director, reports that generally a full complement of musicians will take part in a Sunday service — a bass player and drummer, plus three guitar players, a pianist, keyboardist, a horn section and an assortment of backup singers. “This is not a conservative church,” he says, “and we need to provide concert-quality sound for Sunday events and for the expanding outside requests.”
Sometimes, putting together a system for a church install might be a snap, but on this day, there were a number of challenges. The first, Thompson reports, was the fan-shape and block-brick composition of the room itself. “The curved brick walls just focused energy, and anything that hit them would bounce around for days. We ended up putting acoustic panels on much of the interior of the space — some were diffusion panels and some were absorbent. The diffusion panels worked pretty well, throwing stuff from 4 K, even 8 K, back into the room.”
Thompson opted to treat the surfaces up to 26 feet tall. He then brought in an LCS VRAS system for acoustic enhancements. “In doing so we actually saved the church a pile of money, by accident,” he admits. "So, it was a good thing. We had gone around with an aesthetic designer, and we were working on different kinds of diffusion panels to be dropped with a dropped-ceiling plan. By using the ambient system, we were able to dispense with the dropped ceiling, which made it much easier for all the mechanical, and saved the church a lot of money — about $200,000.”
Steve Ellison designed the LCS system, which features 59 speakers (a blend of 24 Tannoy i6AWs, 28 i8AWs and six CMS12s) and 19 Audio-Technica AE5100 microphones. “It all goes into three LCS mainframes in an unbelievably complicated matrix that Steve programmed, taking into account early reflections and everything else so that the space performs as a well-designed acoustic space,” Shearer says. “One of the great things this has allowed us to do is completely tailor the response of the room on the fly.”
While the LCS system provides an ambient sonic bed, a set of Renkus-Heinz speakers handles the bulk of the P.A. load. “We couldn’t do a line array because of the height requirement,” Thompson explains, “but we used a line array concept without a line array. We put full bandwidth speakers (Renkus-Heinz STX7/94) with large-format horns in the three seating sections. So, there are four 12s in the middle and four 12s on each side. In addition, we put in four mid-band speakers in the middle.” Two Renkus-Heinz STX5Ls are being used as a mid-bass boxes array, and four CT8s have been installed as subwoofers.
At front of house, the team installed the Yamaha PM5D-HR, chosen for its flexibility and power. Indeed, says Shearer, the FOH position is fairly empty thanks to the desk. “We do all of the processing in the 5D,” he reports. “We don’t have external effects. We don’t have external compressors. We’ve been very comfortable doing everything internal to the board.”
The 5D also enabled the design team to create a digital network that’s truly the star of the show at Rolling Hills. A Media Matrix Nion N6 processor is tied to the LCS mainframe via Cobranet. “We bus out of the PM5D and hit some of the zones of the LCS system for sound effects or effects returns,” Shearer explains. “We can literally place sounds at various points in the room, if needed. That’s used mostly for special effects, but it’s fun to think of the space as a complete 360 degree space, rather than all the sound just coming from the front.”
The 5D also helps with the facility’s Aviom A-16CS monitor system, says Shearer, since they are driving 10 monitor mixes via a pair of Aviom output cards. The two cards drive two feeds — one for the musicians and the second for the singers. “There’s a Cat5 patch bay in the back, and everybody can choose what mix they want to be a part of,” Shearer explains. “There are 22 different positions where you can be on stage because of all the floor boxes and all the different connections, so you can instantly patch your Aviom controller and your monitor into any of those locations.”
Most of the musicians during Sunday service use a dozen Renkus-Heinz CFX121M wedges. There are some, Shearer reports, who are using personal monitors and there are plans to expand that number.
When it comes to microphones, Thompson and Shearer chose a combination of wireless and wired mics. The pastor or worship leader uses a DPA 4066 headset mic with a Sabine transmitter. For instruments and wired mics, they purchased a collection of Audix microphones. On the drum kit, they use an Audix DP5A package with three ADX51s (one on the high hat and a pair as overheads) and a D-2 on the tom. An M1290 is on the piano, a D-2 is used for the electric guitar and another D-2 is on a saxophone.
For the mics, the facility boasts 96 possible inputs among 11 floor boxes. The drum kit is patched in via a multipin breakout box so the kit can be moved around and plugged back in without repatching each individual XLR cable. The six microphones flown over the stage that feed the LCS system are transformer isolated and split as six of the 96 mic inputs. Shearer explains. “You can choose to patch directly into those mics as well, but that’s not used for amplification; it’s used for recording. So, you’ve got 68 or so mics in the floor boxes, the six ambient mics and 16 channels of Sabine wireless available.” These channels are then split three ways — one to front of house and one to a recording studio that’s not yet built; the third is available to artists who do not want to use the Aviom system.
The Sabine system was installed, Shearer says, because they are unsure of what’s going to happen with UHF. “All 16 channels of wireless are back in the amplifier room behind the stage,” he explains, “and they are monitored via network back at the front of house booth. So, you can get all of the information about battery life, RF, alphanumeric naming and DSP controls on screen.”
The response, Shearer says, has been overwhelmingly positive. “Keeping in mind that we went from a 600-seat multipurpose room with MI equipment to an accurately designed system, the response has been amazing. It is a very good sounding room. It’s a very controlled sounding room. You can get a lot of decibels in there without it sounding like it’s ripping your head off. You don’t have to fight the room.”
To date, Shearer has use the same technology for a rock band, a 70-piece orchestra and for the Sunday services. “I’ve used it in the middle of services, depending on what’s happening,” he says. “If we’ve got the full rhythm section going, we’ll dry it up. Except if there’s something like a big drum fill we’ll actually kick up the response of the room to make it bounce around a little bit more. If there’s a quiet acoustic solo or duet, we’ll liven up the room a little bit and make it interact as part of the performance a bit more. It’s a fantastic thing to be able to do at the click of a button.”
Thompson reports it was a good project for Clarity. “We were able to do some things that were pushing the envelope,” he says before beginning to laugh, “and then we were pushed into pushing the envelope.”
