MORRISVILLE, NC – Faced with a traditional problem that many churches encounter with their audio systems, Cooper Cannady and the installers from Raleigh Music Brokerage came up with a simple but unique solution.
When Good Hope Baptist in Morrisville, N.C., an older, established church outside of Raleigh built a new facility about seven years ago, responsibility for the audio system design was left to an electrical contractor, which resulted in a system that just wasn’t getting the results the church had originally hoped for.
As Cooper explains the project, “The audio system had been designed and installed by someone we were familiar with, and they’d put a dual 15” sub with a single 12” and 1.5” two-way cabinets hung from the ceiling. That was fine, but the room has a 25-foot ceiling with a depth of 50 feet and the horn pattern was insufficient to cover the width or depth of the room from that position. It sounded okay if you sat in the middle of the room, but the mixing position was elevated in the back of the room, and the operators didn’t even know there was a horn in the rig, so they were basically just getting ‘air disturbance’.”
After some preliminary discussions, Cannady and his team decided to pull the existing cabinets out and put in Martin AQ 8 Architectural Series speakers, which feature an 8-inch-long throw direct radiating bass driver with a 2-inch voice coil and a 1-inch exit compression driver with a 1-inch diaphragm coupled to a rotatable constant directivity HF horn. Or as Cooper puts it more informally, “it’s a really nice-sounding little box, and they’ve outfitted it so you can easily rig it horizontally or vertically, which worked out well for this particular situation."
To take advantage of the AQ8’s 90-degree horizontal and 50-degree vertical coverage, the eight speakers were hung horizontally two per column, two columns per side to adequately cover what is a fairly large room. As Cooper explains, “It’s basically a left-right hang. On house left, we’ve got a pair coming down cantered off about 10 degrees between columns. The approximate vertical 5-degrees between column cabinets covers the seats that are at 0 degrees at the edge of the stage. There is a complementary 120 degrees of horizontal coverage per side. That way, the four cabinets give us a much wider coverage pattern.”
In terms of the actual rigging, two AQ8’s were hung off one mast, with a fabrication consisting of lap hinges on the back and a turnbuckle on one end of the cabinet to space the distance between the cabinets that fit onto one arm. Summing up, Cannady points out that, “Because they’re mounted horizontally with the horizontally rotated horn pattern of 90-degrees horizontal and 50-degrees vertical, it gave us the opportunity to create more vertical rake into the space and get more sound into the back of the room. We kept the existing QSC amps and the rest of the system intact.
“At first, they wanted us to put their subs back in, but we asked them to hold off for a few weeks so they could acclimate to the new Martin Audio system, and we agreed to put the subs back if they weren’t extremely happy. So, they gave it a few weeks because they wanted it to hear it with one of the Christian rock bands that play in the facility, and when I called them in a few weeks, our contact there said, ‘Forget the subs, we don’t want them anymore."
As it turned out, just having those AQ8s in the room provided a much better overall response, vastly improved coverage and a significantly higher audio quality throughout. The system works equally well for electric bands, or the minister’s lavalier mic in terms of clarity and overall balance, so we got everything we needed just with the AQ8s. The church was very pleased with the Martin Audio system and chose to decline the reactivation of the sub. We no longer needed a sub or anything else to go with it.”
For information, please visit www.martin-audio.com.
