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The church reports a textbook-perfect installation process thanks to well-positioned hang points already in place for the total of 29 RoomMatch modules in the system and existing racks able to be loaded with the 18 Bose PowerMatch PM8500 amplifiers needed to power the rig.
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The new four-way system installed at Atlanta’s Church of the Apostles includes 29 Bose Room- Match modules offering a variety of different dispersion patterns to properly fill the space.
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The church first heard the Bose RoomMatch system at a WFX event held in Atlanta in 2012. After travelling to hear the system in numerous other venues, the team warmed to the idea of installing a large-scale professional PA from a company better known for their compact home stereo systems.
When a church looks at technology, it doesn't necessarily stop being a house of worship but it does begin to take on the coolly analytical characteristics of any business looking to make a major capital acquisition. As objective as those perlustrations may be, they are nonetheless vulnerable to perceptual biases that can color the process. And that's what lies behind Kevin Knox's initial assessment of a Bose RoomMatch PA system that was under consideration at the Church of the Apostles, an evangelical megachurch in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood, where Knox is the media and communications director.
“I remember thinking, ‘Bose—they make great headphones for when you're on an airplane but you're not putting them in my sanctuary,'” Knox recalls. “I just didn't associate the Bose brand with professional products.”
That's an issue the Boston-area company has faced since it entered the professional audio sphere in the late 1990s. Its L1 portable PA system, introduced in 2003, achieved a relatively small but avid following among touring musicians, in large part for its seeming imperviousness to feedback problems.
The RoomMatch, which was introduced in 2011, took Bose to another level, putting it up against the more familiar brand names in large-scale house sound systems. The product, which is actually a series of modules with highly specific dispersion patterns that lets sound-system designers cobble together combinations that are very specifically tailored to each space's scale and nuance, has been making steady inroads in houses of worship and elsewhere, though it's ironically still dogged by Bose's more well-known success with compact home stereo systems, interesting and expensive desktop radios, and the noise-cancelling headphones that initially came to Knox's mind when he first encountered the RoomMatch system at a WFX event in 2012.
Then, he heard the system. “It had a real warmth that you don't usually get with a big PA system,” he says. “It felt like it was right there in the room with you. I got the sense that it would be able to give us what we really needed: good intelligibility in the midrange and full-range sound for music.”
Knox and some of his colleagues at the church—he has a 14-person tech team comprised of local AV professionals of various specialties, who are paid staffers—listened to the RoomMatch system in a variety of environments, including some nightclubs. His acceptance of the RoomMatch, intended to replace an aging EAW point-source system in the church's 12-year-old 2,450-seat sanctuary, was more a process than an epiphany, and he found some of his initial reservations shared even by the AV integrator they chose to help design and install the new sound system, Nashville, Tenn.-based CTS. “They were pretty cautious about it at first, too, like everyone else was,” Knox says of CTS, which was brought on board the project after the church decided in favor of the RoomMatch system.
A changing relationship
“[The sound system] had a real warmth that you don’t usually get with a big PA system.”
Kevin Knox
Media and Communications Director, Church of the Apostles, Atlanta, GA
Neal Watson, director of AVL integration at CTS, concurs that he was hesitant at first about the RoomMatch system. “Yes, I was skeptical,” he says, adding that as a design/build firm CTS is used to being in on projects prior to major technology decisions. “Kevin was essentially asking us to come in after they had made their choice about the sound system and to confirm their decisions, to watch their back. They felt they had done their homework and made the right decision but also wanted other thoughts on it.”
Bose gave CTS the same kind of immersive introduction to the RoomMatch system as they had to Kevin Knox and his team, bringing him to listen to the system in a variety of environments and to their Boston-area plant for a deeper look into the technology. Watson warmed to the idea of the RoomMatch, but just as importantly, he recognized that it also fit into the larger philosophy of supporting a client's choices. As houses of worship become more technologically sophisticated as a group, it's inevitable that some will become more assertive when it comes to technology decisions, and that may change the traditional relationship between integrator and client in subtle but important ways. “Technology is playing a much larger role now in the environment we're in,” says Watson. “More churches have technology teams that are more sophisticated and want to be taken seriously. We see our role as supporting that and bringing clarity and definition to their ideas.”
The relationship with the client isn't the only one that's changing. It's not uncommon for sound reinforcement manufacturers to also provide system design services, and prior to CTS's involvement in the project Bose had done exactly that, suggesting particular components and locations for them. CTS reviewed Bose engineers' ideas and largely concurred with them, although there were two areas of mild contention. First, after vetting the design through Bose's Modeler modeling software, Watson recommended that the design implement over-balcony fills not in the original design. “We felt that leaving out the over-balcony fills would have caused the coverage to drop out pretty steeply in that part of the room,” says Watson. That recommendation was integrated into the plan easily, along with the repositioning of several under-balcony speakers, as well.
A somewhat more contentious issue centered on the application of subwoofers. CTS's design called for a combination of 15-inch and 18-inch subs, which would conform to the four-way system design that Watson felt better served the needs of the room than the three-way system originally called for. A four-way system would allow the 18-inch enclosures to handle only the lowest frequencies, with upper lows and lower-mid frequencies crossed over at 80 Hz to the 15-inch subs. “It would result in a much smoother coverage of the low frequencies,” he says. The issue was that the RoomMatch line didn't yet have an 18-inch sub available; the RMS218 subwoofer was out of its design stage but not yet into manufacturing production. With Knox's agreement, Watson pressed on the need for the 18-inch sub, even if it became necessary to use one from a different manufacturer. Bose responded by ramping up its manufacturing cycles and getting the first six RMS218 subwoofers that rolled off their assembly line sent to the Atlanta project site.
“Textbook” installation
[The] acceptance of the RoomMatch … was more a process than an epiphany….
After that, the installation itself was anticlimactic, a textbook process thanks to well-positioned hang points already in place for the total of 29 RoomMatch modules in the system and existing racks able to be loaded with the 18 Bose PowerMatch PM8500 amplifiers needed to power the rig, as well as a good grid of catwalks that further expedited the installation process. Even the acoustical treatment already in place was able to remain.
The new sound system integrated well with the church's existing audio technology, including a Soundcraft Vi4 FOH console.
The new sound system also brings the church's audio to a level that better matches its other media systems, such as the five relatively new Sony HDC-2400 HD video cameras, which are robotically operated using automation from Movie Engineering. The system also includes a Christie Roadster S+16K SXGA DLP projector, focused on a stage lit for broadcast rather than theatrical applications with Strand fixtures. (The lighting needs to be especially bright to overcome natural light from the church's large windows.)
The church captures, edits and then streams its Sunday services using multiple streams at different bit rates that are distributed by its broadcast ministry, “Leading the Way,” which beams to an estimated 190 countries worldwide in 21 languages, as well as distributing them on DVD and other video formats, and on its leased satellite channel.
The sound system also brings the church's blended-service music program, with its combination of a band and congregational singing, a fuller sound—something Knox says the congregation noticed immediately after the new system went live in early August. “We got comments about it, but what really told me that the system was a success is that I never heard them sing so loud,” he says. “It's really engaging them more.”
But a lasting lesson from the project is that churches and their AV integration partners are, in some cases, moving to new kind of relationship—one that can benefit from even greater synergies.
“We can engage in a higher level of conversation with this kind of client,” Watson closes. “That's only going to make the outcomes better.”
