With an ultimate goal to reach over 100,000 people every Sunday, NewSpring Church puts temphasis not only on the spoken word - which is streamed live from Anderson - but also on high-energy live music at each site boasting concert tour production values and sound levels.
Pleased with the dV-DOSC loudspeaker system installed in its 2,500-seat home sanctuary seven years ago, the church has recently been commissioning L-Acoustics certified provider LMG Systems Integration of Orlando to design and install Karai systems for all of its newest locations. NewSpring's Columbia and Greenwood campuses, which both opened around the turn of the year, are the first two worship centers to benefit from the arrays.
Columbia's 80,000sq.ft building, which previously served as a Kmart, has now been fully remodelled around a 1,500-seat sanctuary featuring a house sound system of seven Karai flown per side, plus a single 12XTi per side for out-fill coverage. Six coaxial 8XTi enclosures are spread across the stage lip for front-fill, with five SB28 subs deployed for low-end punch. The entire system is driven by a combination of LA8 and LA4 amplified controllers.
The Greenwood campus - a remodelled 90,000sq.ft former Walmart - utilises a similar system for its 1,200-seat sanctuary featuring six KARAi and one 12XTi per side for out-fill coverage, five 8XTi front-fills, four SB28 subs and a few less amplified controllers.
"The ceiling of our Greenwood worship center is less than 18 feet high, so we had very limited room for arrays, but Karai fit the space nicely," says NewSpring Church technical director Joel Yates. "Even with only six cabinets per side the system is capable of absolutely 'in-your-face' rock volumes while still producing smooth, consistent coverage. Although the style of music we generally do is worship, it's often guitar-driven and very heavy on drums so we needed a sound system capable of producing 105dB A-scale while still being clear and transparent. It's not surprising to hear our worship teams perform cover songs by artists like Fallout Boy, U2, Brad Paisley, even AC/DC, and this system can totally put out the volume we need while maintaining the clarity.
"My first experience with L-Acoustics was mixing on a V-DOSC rig nearly 10 years ago and it totally spoiled me," he reports. "The clarity was amazing; I was hearing things that I had never heard in a PA before. As a result, we installed dV-DOSC in our Anderson sanctuary and have run it fairly hard for three or four services every week since 2006 with great results and very little required maintenance.
"Karai has already proven to be the right choice to standardize on for our newest venues. It's very smooth and natural sounding for spoken word, yet delivers the punch and volume our musical performances require. Plus, it offers some noticeable improvements over its predecessor, such as a much sharper and more predictable dispersion pattern cutoff of 110 degrees, which can be helpful."
(Jim Evans)
