L-Acoustics delivers for The Grove

USA - When The Grove Community Church of Riverside, California built its current Worship Centre more than a dozen years ago, Olympia, Washington-based CCI Solutions facilitated the design and installation of the sound system for its 1,800-seat main auditorium. Since that time, like many churches, The Grove’s music sets have gradually moved toward a more contemporary praise style requiring a robust sound system to best capture both the band’s impact and vocalists’ intelligibility.
When CCI Solutions recently got the call to once again assess the room’s sonic needs, the integrator recommended a new system built on L-Acoustics’ Kara(i) and Kiva II platforms.
“The Grove definitely takes a more contemporary approach to music, but the only thing that’s safe to expect is the unexpected,” notes CCI Solutions vice president of sales and integration Duke DeJong. “Their team is highly creative and dynamic, so they mix it up pretty regularly going from a traditional worship set with a 25-piece choir and full orchestra one week to a high-energy, modern worship music set the next. They really needed a system that could handle it all and we knew that L-Acoustics would certainly deliver.”
Using L-Acoustics’ Soundvision 3D real-time acoustical modelling software, CCI Solutions project lead Mark Pearson explored numerous designs and ultimately specified a system featuring left and right main arrays each comprised of 11 Kara(i) enclosures with eight SB18i subs flown in a central horizontal array between them.
Twin arrays of six smaller Kiva II enclosures are hung outside of the Kara to address the wide room’s far left and right seating areas, while KS28 subs are ground-stacked two per side under each end of the stage thrust. Several coaxial X8 and X12 enclosures are utilized for various fill applications, and eight amplified controllers power the entire system: six LA8 for the Kara/Kiva II and SB18i, an LA4X for the coaxial fills, and an LA12X for the KS28.
“Thanks to the right products and people, this project was a huge success and I would rank it in my top three system designs of my 20-year history at CCI Solutions,” Pearson says.
The deployment of two models of subwoofers - flown SB18i and grounded KS28 -allows the new PA to adapt for a variety of performance types. “The flown SB18 are being run with the full range of the system as an LF extension to the Kara/Kiva II, and then the KS28 are switchable between being run with the system and run from an aux off the console,” he describes.
Shortly after the new system went in, The Grove received a prestigious WFX Solomon Award for its sound system retrofit project.
(Jim Evans)

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