Lucerne, Colo.’s Northern Colorado Cowboy Church, or N3C for short, is located in a former restaurant building. Although a large number of cowboy boots walk through the door every Sunday, N3C is open to everyone. The “Cowboy” in its name reflects the church’s down-to-earth attitude. As one might guess, services at N3C are lively and contemporary, with high-energy music complementing colorful sermons. Although the church originally moved into the converted restaurant with a homegrown PA-on-sticks, N3C aspired to something with much greater musical impact and intelligibility to cover its 500+ seats.
Local integration firm Audio Video Colorado designed and installed a new system centered on two Danley Sound Labs SM-60F full-range loudspeakers. The excellent pattern control reportedly energizes the crowd without energizing the walls, which—designed for the former restaurant —were never designed to do good things with high-volume sound.
“They had a lot of complaints about intelligibility and the overall quality of the sound of the home-grown PA,” says Jeff Brotherston, president and design engineer at AV Colorado. “It was very uneven. The space itself is unique and difficult to cover. The room is roughly shaped like a stubby capital ‘L,’ with the stage tucked into the corner that faces both segments of the ‘L.’ To do it justice, we had to get surgical with the coverage pattern, and that’s what Danley is known for. With help from the technical staff at Danley, we designed a simple system that would provide perfect coverage.”
Worship technology fine-tuning
The rest of the system was in need of an upgrade, as well. Brotherston cleaned up N3C’s wireless with an RFvenue Diversity Fin Antenna and gave them a new Soundcraft digital console with a Dante-networked 16-channel stage box. New Xilica processing and Crown amplification provide a worthy front-end for the Danley system. Each Danley SM-60F covers a separate segment of the room’s “L” shape. In addition, a Danley SH-Mini on delay covers an area of seats behind a support beam that blocks coverage from the main loudspeakers, and two JBL CBT-series loudspeakers provide fill for the first few rows.
“We really appreciated the help we received from Danley on the front end design,” says Brotherston. “Once we had the system in place, we called on Robert Langlois of Second Opinion Audio to tune it to perfection. All in all, it was a great team effort. The church and its congregation are very pleased with the upgrade. It gave them the musical impact and intelligibility they were missing in the old system.”
Learn more about Northern Colorado Cowboy Church here.
