Located near Mammoth Cave National Park in Glasgow, Kentucky, Coral Hill Baptist Church services offer a range of musical styles, both within any given service and from week-to-week. When steady growth made its old, traditional sanctuary too cramped, the church made plans for a new sanctuary adjacent to the old with seating for 300. Local A/V integration firm Red Ranger Media worked with the church on a suitable sound reinforcement system – despite an abundance of reflective concrete and dry wall surfaces.

‘In moving from its old sanctuary to a new sanctuary of its own design, Coral Hill Baptist Church wanted to decrease the distance to the back row to make the services as intimate as the senior pastor of 32 years had always wanted them to be,’ explains Allen Cothran, owner of Red Ranger Media. ‘The new sanctuary is very wide with a short throw – no more than 40ft to the back row of seating. The floor is concrete and the walls are dry wall, so good pattern control was essential. On top of that, services might include everything from traditional hymns to a high-energy praise band. There might be pedal steel one week and no guitars at all the next week. They even have a Bluegrass service once a month.

‘Since the church wason a tight budget, I suggested we could achieve the goals of the sound reinforcement system without acoustical treatments if we went with Danley point-source technology,’ Cothran continues. ‘With the right models in place, we could keep energy on people and off of the walls and ceiling. When we inevitably got into budget-cutting conversations, I said we can cut on microphones, amplifiers, and other system components, but I wasn’t gonna budge on Danley.’

Cothran used Danley Direct modeling software to perfect his design: ‘I started with amn LR design using SM96s, but it was clear I’d be missing the edges,’ he says. ‘But when I swapped them out for SM60Fs and added an SM96 in the centre, everything came together beautifully. I ran the model past the engineers at Danley, and they made a few small tweaks. We installed the system as designed and then had to pull our scaffolding down immediately so that carpet could be installed on the stage.

‘We fired the system up and were relieved to find that the coverage was exactly as the model had predicted. From previous installations and this latest experience at Coral Hill, I have come to appreciate Danley’s predictability.’

Cothran intended to give the church a full-range sound system, and the church wanted a full-range sound system, but was reluctant to incorporate subwoofers after a well-meaning congregant had brought one into a service years ago: ‘It hadn’t gone well,’ Cothran reports. ‘They told me the whole service had a roaring sound that was distracting and awful. So, their idea of a subwoofer was a bad experience.’

Since the SM60Fs already include extended low end to 66Hz and since the church didn’t need concert-level kicks, so a THmini15 is flown above the centre SM96.

An Ashly Audio nXp 1.54 powers the system with onboard DSP for modest input and loudspeaker conditioning, and an Allen & Heath SQ-6 digital mixer gives church tech volunteers control of the system.

‘System commissioning was fast and easy,’ Cothran says. ‘We fired it up, adjusted the crossover point, set the levels, and that was basically it. There’s a little bit of equalisation in the 300-500Hz range, but it’s modest – less than 4dB.’

‘I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and commented on how good the system sounds,’ adds Andy Brownfield, youth pastor and Media Director at the church.’