HOUSTON, TX — The Second Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, has renovated its West Campus, doubling its existing size. The new 4,500-seat worship center’s design somewhat resembles a plus sign, with the stage in the center and 360-degree seating tapering out to four quadrants. Atlanta-based performance engineering firm Clark ProMedia is the supplier of the new specialized sound system, which incorporates Meyer Sound’s M1D compact curvilinear array loudspeaker.
“It’s quite unlike a typical theatre-in-the-round,” explains Matt Card, Clark ProMedia’s vice president of client development. “The room actually behaves more like four separate 1,100-seat rooms, with sound going out to each wing, and we had to conceive the system to function on that basis. But while each section runs independently, all four need to be synchronized. So what you end up with is four 1,100-seat rectangular rooms that intersect at a common stage. At the front of each quadrant, the seating curves to a more traditional circular arc.”
Each quadrant uses an array of 10 M1D cabinets for each stereo channel, totaling 80 cabinets throughout the hall. At the corners of the quadrants, aisles form a natural division between each wing, with the flat floor area in front moving up to a more stadium-like incline toward the rear. “We used the aisles as acoustical dead zones, so to speak,” Clark says. “That’s where we created our overlap.”
The system uses a pair of LD-3 compensating line drivers to tailor the sound and drive the arrays, and eight 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers are flown to cover low end, two per quadrant.
“We’ve worked to achieve a stereo signal no matter where you’re sitting,” adds George Clark, Clark ProMedia’s founder and chief engineer. “This is accomplished by alternating the arrays for each quadrant, so that left and right signals are always adjacent to each other going around the space. That meant reversing left and right as you go around the circle so that you don’t end up with left next to left anywhere.”
“The M1D is a very tightly focused box, which is why we were able to only use 10 per side,” Clark concludes. “We’d originally planned on using 12, but the MAPP prediction said 10 would do the trick, and it proved to be accurate.”
More information is available by visiting www.meyersound.com.
