Sunday services at the East Sunshine Christian Church in Springfield Missouri are all about singing along. The church’s contemporary worship style is based around four-part a capella harmonies, led by the group onstage and accompanied by anyone in the congregation who cares to join in.
East Sunshine’s 1,500-seat sanctuary is big, bright and welcoming, and Sunday services are well attended, but the church had struggled for some time with an inefficient sound system: ‘We rely on people in the congregation being able to hear their part,’ Worship Minister Randy Wray observes. ‘When the sound is muddled and there’s no distinction, it’s very hard to sing and appreciate the four-part harmony.’
A major renovation of the sanctuary, including a new sound system featuring Renkus-Heinz Iconyx Gen5 digitally steered array loudspeakers, has now corrected the problem: ‘It’s a very wide room, with a 60-ft peak in the middle and a very large rear wall,’ says Darren Smith of Sensory Integration A/V who designed and installed the system. ‘The previous system really didn’t provide the vocal intelligibility they needed, and coverage was very inconsistent. We’ve actually done multiple demos of different line arrays in this room, and could never really achieve the coverage we needed.’
‘The best way to describe the old system was muffled – there was really no intelligibility,’ Wray agrees. ‘It also really mattered where you sat. Some people complained they couldn’t hear, and others said it was too loud.’
Sensory Integration’s solution was to create a left-centre-right system using a pair of IC Live ICL-FR-N columns to the left and right of the stage and a dual IC2 array with two IC2-FR systems in the centre, cut into the top of the proscenium. ‘The Iconyx beam steering gave us the ability to steer the sound away from the back walls, dramatically reducing reflections and increasing intelligibility. The LCR configuration also gave us excellent, consistent coverage – you can sit anywhere in the auditorium and get great sound.’
‘With the previous system, we could get away with weaker singers onstage,’ Randy Wray says. ‘As soon as I heard the new system, my first thought was that we need to get better onstage, because people are going to hear everything.’
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