WAYNE, NJ — The Beth Israel Worship Center, in its present New Jersey location since 2008, recently called on Dominick Campana of Pro Sound Associates in Guilderland, NY to upgrade its main sound system. Based upon the needs of the congregation and staff, Campana installed a complete QSC sound reinforcement system including WideLine-8 line arrays, PowerLight 3 Series amplifiers and an SC28 Digital Signal Processor.
More details from QSC Audio Products (www.qsc.com)
“It’s a very wide room with a very, very low drop ceiling, and a big congregation,” says Campana, who acted as designer, project manager and lead audio technician on the project. The roughly L-shaped room at the worship center, which is led by Jonathan Cahn, Senior Pastor, Messianic Rabbi and President of Hope of the World Ministries, features an interior modeled after the ancient city of Jerusalem, with a stone finish matching the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. The requirement to integrate the new PA rig with the worship center’s existing equipment and to design the system to accommodate a contemporary band performing on a corner stage posed some additional challenges.
Pro Sound Associates installed two arrays of five WL3082 enclosures each. A pair of PL380 two-channel 4,000W amplifiers plus a single PL340 two-channel 2,000W amplifier provide power to the arrays, which are processed via an SC28 digital signal processor. “The decision to go with QSC was an easy one, not only for the quality and performance of the loudspeakers, but also as a products which are compact and yet have the wide coverage that we need, the fidelity that we demand, and the high output that is required,” comments Campana.
“We tried to keep the signal flow as uninhibited as possible, so we have a direct feed from the existing console to the SC28 processor into the PL3 amplifiers,” he continues. “The SC28 processor was the clear choice to solve their audio problems within that space and to make sure everything was as good as it could be at the output stage.”
The new QSC system replaced a distributed system of zoned clusters on delays. “The previous system was never consistent,” Campana reports. “The one thing that made the biggest difference was changing out the loudspeakers. Having a high quality pair of WideLine arrays for coverage and in order to keep everything time-aligned naturally, as opposed to electronically, was key in that space.”
Campana also explains that he made full use of the QSC EASE Focus three-dimensional acoustic simulation software on this project. “Choosing the pick points and splay angles was easy and modeled right out of the box,” he says.
The WideLine arrays are suspended from QSC’s AF3082 array frames. “The worship center staff added some seats a little closer to the stage after we installed the system. And because of the simple design of the rigging system, it is very easy for the end-user to make adjustments to the bottom boxes and alter the coverage.
The staff and congregation at Beth Israel Worship Center are pleased with the performance of the new system, according to Campana. “The pastor in charge of the worship group said, ‘Wow, now I can actually hear what everybody sounds like!’ The term that they used over and over again, speaking with me in person and via email, is that they’ve been blessed with this new sound system. It’s a very energetic worship group, and there’s a lot of passion in their services, so our goal was to do that justice by providing a top-notch system.”
