When the Northside Baptist Church in Huntsville, Texas, sought a sound system for its newly constructed worship space, the technical team faced familiar challenges –leadership needed to ensure the best possible sound coverage for the sanctuary while balancing the demands of music in worship and clarity of speech. Additionally, all this needed to be achieved on a keen budget.

Marking the first installation of TW Audio’s Ella loudspeaker system in the US, the chosen system has been greeted by Northside Baptist Church Youth Pastor Bob Slie as having transformed the church’s worship experience.

Slie first experienced Ella as part of an early demonstration of the technology at the WFX Show in Orlando. At the time, the church leadership had become frustrated by their search for a sound system – providers had either suggested very expensive options or cheap proposals that Slie and his colleagues knew would prove inadequate. But on hearing a demonstration of just four compact Ella6 boxes accompanied by a single S32 cardioid subwoofer, he sought out the TW Audio team to discuss the church’s needs.

Offering an alternative to traditional installed sound options, Ella combines the slim form factor of a column with the flexibility of a line array plus built-in passive cardioid technology. Each Ella6 unit combines a custom waveguide with five 1-inch dome tweeters to reproduce high frequencies up to 20kHz, matched with a custom designed high-performance 6.5-inch driver.

Now completed, Northside Baptist Church boasts 22 Ella6 elements supported by six Vera S32i. These are configured in two hangs of eight Ella6 as the main left and right arrays with a further hang of two Ella6 as the centre fill plus two further arrays of Ella6 to provide left and right out-fill. Low-end support is courtesy of a central cluster of three pairs of Vera S32i, while power is delivered by five Powersoft Quattrocanali 8804 Dante+DSP amplifiers using the dedicated TW Audio presets.

‘Ella is the ideal solution for the space,’ reflects TW Audio’s Mick Whelan. ‘The system performance has to be heard to be believed – the coverage is completely uniform throughout the listening area with zero phasing anomalies as you move left to right, or from front to back.

‘Also, the passive cardioid topology of the Ella6 and cardioid design of the subwoofer cluster ensures a very quiet stage area – so much so that the musicians had to adapt to their new environment. They were used to hearing so much sound spill onto the stage that it was a new experience for them to have a properly controlled space. Of course that’s a joy for any monitor or front of house engineer working with lots of open mics.’

The installation was supported by local A/V systems integrator Arrendell Media, whose owner Brian Arrendell ensured the project was delivered without incident.

‘We really are very proud to have brought TW Audio’s Ella to the United States with such an impressive project,’ Whelan says. ‘Northside Baptist Church needs to be heard to be appreciated, it’s a wonderful space.’

Having found the solution he spent so long searching for, Bob Slie agrees: ‘In 21 years with this church, I’ve never heard our music sound like this.’