ST. LOUIS, MO – St. Louis Audio Visual Inc. recently addressed some coverage challenges at Southgate Church with two WorxAudio TrueLine X3-P compact line array systems.
Craig Breckenridge, VP of sales, noted the hurdles posed by the project.
"The sanctuary is approximately 40 feet deep and 60 feet wide, and the altar / stage area faces into the room's width," he noted. Along with the need to cover an area that is far wider that it is long, "the ceiling height is quite low-barely 13 feet." Also, "for music worship services, the client was looking to average 93 dB throughout the space."
That added up to the need for "extremely broad horizontal dispersion characteristics," which led, in turn, to the TrueLine X3-Ps.
"The 15-inch horn cabinets previously installed were leaving voids in the coverage area and were alternately ‘killing' people up front while delivering low intelligibility in the back of the room," Breckenridge noted.
With their 35-degree vertical throw and 160-degree horizontal dispersion, he added, the X3-P enclosures "deliver a 50-foot coherent throw" that "perfectly matched" the room's requirements.
"The entire room is within 3 dB of the front row-even with a 13-foot ceiling," Breckenridge noted. "With the X3-P's wide horizontal dispersion, we could have easily achieved excellent results with a single enclosure, but the client wanted to image the performances in stereo," he said. "I must say, that the stereo imaging everywhere in this space is amazing."
Breckenridge added that the church's sanctuary, in many respects, is "a multipurpose area," with the need for speech intelligibility paired with the need to make the most of the praise band's live music, which combines keyboards, bass, guitars, drums, and a multi-person vocal ensemble for the 400 to 500 people who attend the worship services.
"The space has low pile carpeted floors and an acoustical tile ceiling. Padded, moveable movie theater style seating is typically arranged in a 160-degree fan that extends out from the stage area.
"Each of the WorxAudio X3-P line arrays was positioned as close to the ceiling as we could manage-at a height of 12 feet using 1.5-inch NPT threaded extension pipes with a Chief CMA395 angled ceiling mount attached to each cabinet," Breckenridge continued. The two line arrays are positioned at the front edge of the stage area with about 15 feet of separation between the two enclosures.
"We've all been very impressed with the new system's horizontal coverage and the consistency of the sound pressure level throughout the room," said Chris Clausen, Southgate Church's music minister. "These new loudspeakers deliver a woody, detailed midrange for instruments such as acoustic guitar, and voices sound clear and natural."
Clausen added that "we have plenty of headroom to spare," and envisioned that, with their wide spread and detailed stereo imaging capabilities, "I can envision us using these loudspeakers for an outside event. We've been very pleased."
For more information, please visit www.stlouisav.com and www.worxaudio.com.
