James Elizondo has been a member and staffer at the Las Vegas International Church for eight years now. Over the years, he has seen four different PAs go up, including the recently completed move from D.A.S. Aero 48s to a hang that includes D.A.S. Aero 28as, Variant 25as and ST 215 subs.
The latest system is quite an upgrade from the first PA he found when originally attending services. “It was homemade from a guy in Reno,” Elizondo starts. “He specialized in car audio and he made something like I’ve never seen before, it was the most gigantic looking contraption of a speaker you’ve ever seen."
The cabinets had four 15s (two at the top, two at the bottom) with a trapezoidal design in the middle that included nine 7-inch speakers and six bullet tweeters. Each box was wired to a passive crossover and came out of one ¼-inch jack in the back of the speaker. To carry the bottom end, the guy built eight 8-foot boxes with four 15-inch subwoofers. The entire PA was powered off a pair of two Macrotech 5000 amps.
“Literally a car stereo”
“It was literally a car stereo,” he adds with a laugh. “He built something that didn’t sound good by any means, but it made enough noise across the whole church where everybody could hear.”
The next stop, on the PA side of things at the LVIC, came in 2003 when an EAW KF850 rig was flown and then a couple of years later the Aero 48s went up. Each of those PAs, Elizondo reports, was selected purely for cost considerations. “We never sat down and said, ‘Okay, this is the box that this room needs. Let’s use a speaker protocol to tell us how and where to hang it, so we can get right coverage and consistent SPL from front to back.’”
That changed in 2008 when the walls around the church’s sanctuary were brought in 28 feet and the Aero 48 line array would not work in the space. “The 48s were way too big and they weren’t quite agile enough to cover the space,” he explains. “We were really looking for something that would cover from the edge of the stage through the seating and it needed to stay seamless. Also, because of sight lines and aesthetics, I couldn’t have any speakers on the ground.”
The Aero 28s were selected for a number of reasons, including maneuverability and 120-degree dispersion. “Our room is 80 feet deep, but 240 feet wide, so the aspect ratio of the room is awkward,” Elizondo explains. “It’s a shallow but wide room and that dispersion helps us pick up the width that we needed in the room.”
The previous installation of Aero 48s was a LCR hang, but this time the team went with five different hangs. On the extreme outside, four D.A.S. ST215 subs were hung per side. Just inside of those hangs are two hangs of eight Aero 28a cabinets and then a center hang of six Variant 25a boxes.
D.A.S. Aero-ware protocol was used while hanging the speakers and then Elizondo turned to Smaart Live to set the delay times and do whatever EQ correction was necessary for the room.
A Shift to Powered Speakers
One of the advantages of hanging so many PAs over the years was the fact that the troughs for the cable run were already installed. That said, all of the NL4 and NL8 cable was replaced with XLR and AC power because the 28s are powered speakers.
In addition to the new boxes, Elizondo upgraded the speaker controllers to XTA LMS-D6s. “I didn’t use the XTA controllers for any crossover, it being a powered PA the amp module in the boxes have all the crossover built into them. But I used the processor for the sake of delay times, EQ correction and limiting.”
Other upgrades included the addition of Shure UHF-R series with KSM9 capsules to replace the Shure UA and ULX inventory, the change to Crown XTI amps to power new Radian Microwedges for pulpit monitors, an installation of the JLH AxeTrack for all electric guitars and the move from wedges for band monitoring to personal monitors.
Elizondo selected the XTI amps for the DSP to control the crossover, limiter and EQ in the monitors, and he can check the amps from front of house on his laptop via Harmon’s HiQnet. The AxeTrack was added to reduce stage volume, as were the personal monitors.
“Not here for a concert”
While Elizondo considers the personal monitors “an upgrade,” he admits that others might consider it “a downgrade,” laughing. “But we had a lot of problems with stage volume, which is always a huge battle in a church. We don’t want to run super high SPL to try to stay over the stage — people aren’t coming here for a concert. So, everyone on stage, except the pastor, is on personal monitors. To me that was a big plus. Some of the musicians may disagree with me, but it cut my stage volume by a significant enough amount to where I don’t worry about it anymore.”
The new system has pleased the entire team of church staffers, from the team that handles the facility’s aesthetics — because the Aero 28 is less obtrusive than the previous line array — to the folks who work in the bookstore.
“I felt so bad for the people who work in the bookstore,” Elizondo says. “Somehow they became known as the complaint department and before we did the install they would hear whenever people felt it was to loud or they couldn’t hear the pastor. They wouldn’t know what to say, but now we’ve got great intelligibility and good coverage.”
So, what are bookstore staffers doing now? Elizondo laughs. “Hopefully selling more books.”
