DEVILLE, LA – System designer Jim Young, owner of Current Design in Acoustics, cited a noticeable upgrade in sound quality at Philadelphia Baptist Church of Deville, LA, after upgrading with Bag End gear.
"The best way I can describe hearing Bag End bass is that of not noticing that they are there; the bass energy fills the room with authority, yet without bringing attention to the anomalies usually associated with sub-bass projection into an auditorium from a conventional speaker," Young said.
The church had recently replaced the central speaker system in its auditorium – a system that had experienced multiple failures – and took advantage of that replacement to upgrade the entire sound system.
Deville is a town of only 1,007 inhabitants, but Philadelphia Baptist Church serves a much larger congregation, drawn from other communities in the Alexandria-Pineville area of central Louisiana.
Providing music for the services attended by this audience involves both an orchestra and choir, and it was important to both the church leaders and the congregation that the sound system projecting this music be both reliable and faithful in its reproduction.
The audio renovation was completed in two stages. The immediate need was for an emergency repair of the central speaker cluster. Rather than continuing with components that had failed multiple times in the past, the church opted to move forward with a new central speaker design, which was completed pre-renovation.
The complete sound system design that followed during auditorium renovation featured five Bag End PD18-AD powered dual 18-inch subwoofers with a Bag End Infra MXB integrator, along with five custom-designed cavities and hard wood louver covers.
The design also included an LCR stereo playback system, a choir monitoring system, four conventional stage monitor circuits mixed from the house console and an Aviom personal monitor system.
The Bag End subwoofers were selected to provide the most natural listening experience with extended low frequency performance and no coloration of the bass frequency energy as is found in most other subs that use tuned boxes or tuned ports.
Philadelphia Baptist Church uses a full orchestra and choir each Sunday. Passive acoustical diffusion in the ceiling over the congregation supports congregational ensemble and blending, while over the choir/orchestra area a high density wide bandwidth diffusion surface provides blending and ensemble for the choral performance area.
The congregation and members of the musical staff have also noticed the change, and have mentioned to church leadership the pleasure of worshiping in this auditorium, with its sound quality characterized by clarity and power.
For more information, please visit www.bagend.com.
