When Bret Lambert, owner of Procure Distributing in Owasso, Okla., walked into the University Heights Baptist Church earlier this year, he was a bit surprised. It wasn’t the complete gutting and rebuilding of the church’s sanctuary, not the expanse of musical styling that the members perform or the fact that so much happens in this Stillwater church that they had to update their PA. No, what surprised him was what was already installed. Slap from the Sides
“The original sound system was put in, I’m guessing, around the mid-1980s,” he starts. “It was JBL horns and JBL 15s, all in separate boxes. It provided them just atrocious coverage, because I bet those were 110 degree horns and they were just pounding the side walls and sending quite a bit of slap back from the sides.”
And while he shook his head with that knowledge, it made his assignment that much clearer. “We had to get the intelligibility up, make it aesthetically pleasing, plus get the coverage everywhere that they needed,” he says.
While Lambert was charged with designing and installing the audio system, Native Audio Video in nearby Bixby, Okla. handled all of the video projection needed for the newly outfitted church.
Church officials educated Lambert on the types of services typically held at UHBC, which amounted to everything and anything from traditional worship services to weddings to local events. During worship services, music ranges from a praise band to a choir to a soloist, and the system had to accommodate all with clarity and power.
A Challenging Layout
The first challenge he recognized was the church’s layout. “The sanctuary is 40 feet wide by 76 feet in length from the pulpit area to the back wall,” Lambert reports. “The back 30 feet of the room has a balcony area, so we needed to ensure proper coverage both in the upper and lower seating areas.”
Of course, that meant getting those JBL components out and finding a line array that could keep the sound on the audience and off the walls. Ultimately, he ended up selecting the D.A.S. Audio Variant line array for the room. The center cluster incorporates five Variant 25A boxes with a single Variant 18A subwoofer at the top of the loudspeaker stack. To cover the audience sitting under the balcony, Lambert installed a pair of D.A.S. Audio’s Artec 26.
Directing the Sound
The Variant boxes accomplished a handful of additional things, including eliminating the need to acoustically treat the room. “The walls in the room are just stained wood and it has a pretty good absorption coefficiency,” he says. “With the line arrays we’re able to keep the sound off the sidewalls and headed straight down into the congregation.”
The only treatment in the room was used to cover an air conditioning duct that is directly above the speaker cluster. “The contractor put up acoustical absorption material to hide the duct,” he explains. “We didn’t need to add material anywhere else, because with the stage back wall shaped the way it is and with the balcony riser seating, there just isn’t much potential for front to back slap.”
In addition to being concerned about coverage, Lambert has to ensure that the system could be driven by church staff as well as visiting engineers. To that end, he selected the new Roland M-400 digital mixing console for its ease of use. The M-400 enables church staff to set scenes for different events, provides all of the necessary signal processing and enables them to password protect the console if a visiting tech comes through. “They have been very happy with all of the features on the board and it’s ease of use, even for novice sound personnel,” he says. “It’s worked out extremely well.”
CAT5s vs. Snakes
Adding a digital board also eased the installation process, since there was an issue with getting the microphone snake from the stage to the FOH position. “It was much easier to sneak a couple of CAT5s through the existing conduit and in between fir strips on the walls,” he says.
The Variants are self-powered, so Lambert did not have to think about installing any amps. And, it turns out, there is plenty of power to fill the room no matter what kind of event is taking place. “The sound pressure level is very capable of getting over the crowd,” he says. “They don’t get extremely rambunctious, but it will easily do at FOH location 103 dB.”
All in all, the addition of the new system has delivered on the church’s demands. “It’s a very natural and smooth system,” Lambert states. “There’s no variance in volume from side to side and front to back. Everything is within +/- 2 dB regardless of where you’re at, and they’re just extremely happy with that they have now.”
