Rock Bridge Community Church turns to L-Acoustics
- Details
It’s also easy on the ears, as five of Rock Bridge’s venues - Calhoun, Chatsworth, Ringgold, and Dalton’s Stage 123 and historic 1,165-seat Wink Theatre - now have L-Acoustics A Series constant curvature line source sound systems, each of which sound nearly identical thanks to the use of the manufacturer’s new M1 measurement tool suite.
“The A Series is a very cohesive system,” says Steele Beaty of Skylark Audio Video, the Oklahoma City-based integrator that designed and installed the PA for all five worship spaces. “The Wide boxes have a 30-degree vertical pattern, and the Focus has a 10-degree vertical pattern. Between them, we have the tools we need to fill a challenging venue like the Wink Theatre, where the balcony is 105ft long, and the main floor is 95ft long, but the entire venue is only 56ft wide.
“It’s the very definition of a ‘shotgun’ room, and that’s why we chose to fly left and right arrays of five A15 Focus enclosures over one A15 Wide. Plus, the A15 enclosures have the Panflex adjustable waveguides that let us narrow the pattern width to 70 degrees, which also gives us a +2dB boost in the high frequencies. So not only do we avoid getting any energy on the walls, but we accomplish it without using any DSP. A traditional line source array simply can’t do what we were able to accomplish at the Wink with the L-Acoustics A Series medium-throw line source array.”
Rock Bridge Community Church director of strategic initiatives John David Boreing adds that the Wink Theatre location - a landmarked building that first opened in 1941 as a movie theatre and was purchased by the church in 2004, two years after they began using it - presented particular challenges that the A15 system was able to overcome. “The large balcony was the really difficult part,” explains Boreing, whose portfolio at the church includes facilities and production. “With the previous sound system, the balcony was looking at the top of the line array and didn’t get any low end from the floor-mounted subs. It was a tough room to get proper coverage for. The new A15-KS21 combo fixed that immediately.”
The Wink Theatre installation, whose design was done using Soundvision modelling software, also made use of the new M1 suite, a comprehensive set of measurement tools from L-Acoustics. “We were able to measure the performance of all of the A15 speaker systems in one venue and create a consistent contour that we applied to all of the church’s locations,” says Beaty. “We were able to make them sound as identical to each other as humanly possible.”
Boreing agrees, saying it’s great to have such sonic consistency across so many of the church’s venues. “The A Series sounds amazing in every place we have it,” he says. “Each church location strives to deliver a consistent message and having L-Acoustics in most of our venues helps communicate that.”
(Jim Evans)
