We work hard to create worship experiences that are special--the best that they can be. For many churches, it is a study in balance between striving to be unique in order to be noticed and providing an experience that is both comfortable and memorable to bring worshippers back for more. Without question, technology is a key ingredient in the formula for growing churches.
For Faith Church, which brings its own specific style of worship to campuses in Saint Louis and West Palm Beach, Fla., creating a consistent and powerful audio experience is a key factor.
“Audio is such a unique identifier for churches,” says Jerrod Cring, head of sales for 3G Productions Inc., church specialists and production experts with locations in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami. “With four locations in Saint Louis and two in West Palm Beach, Faith Church has come to understand the value of consistent audio, a trademark ‘sound’ that can be recognized across all their campuses.”
Finding the Faith Church sound
As an ordained pastor and former church technical director, Cring recognized and respected Faith Church’s desire to have identifiable audio. He also knew that the challenge for his team of audio designers would be to find a line of top-notch audio products what would both integrate well in the church’s varied installations, as well as provide the identifiable sound signature that Faith Church Technical Director Marcos Machado was looking for. “We recognized that Faith Church had a hodge-podge of systems across the campuses, some installed 30 years ago,” Machado says, “so each campus had its own sound, fingerprint and problems. Standardization helps everyone to have the same experience.”
Cring confirms, recalling, “We found a potpourri of technologies across the different campuses.” With no consistency from campus to campus, the worship experiences and technical issues that local teams were trying to solve were all different.
“Striving for a common technology platform across campuses is a great idea,” Cring continues. “But, making this type of dramatic change across multiple campuses is not something you can just snap your fingers to make happen.” After considering all the options, Cring and Machado landed on the professional sound of L-Acoustics loudspeaker systems with a plan to upgrade existing mixers to Digico consoles as the new standard for all Faith Church installations, and they started on a plan to work through improvements at each location. “For us, L-Acoustics was the ideal choice,” says Cring. “They offer a wide range of products that will handle the varied design considerations and still maintain the same sonic signature.”
Machado and 3G Productions worked on finding solutions for each location. One of the most challenging would be the church’s West Palm Beach, Fla., location where dynamic pastors, David and Nicole Crank, deliver two powerful contemporary Sunday morning services. “The West Palm Beach campus meets in the 900-seat auditorium at Palm Beach Lakes Community High School,” notes Cring, “so it had to be a portable installation, but the church wisely wanted it to have the same level of professional sound.”
Marcos Machado, Faith Church Technical Director
The services at the high school would require a big sound from a portable system. The 3G design team worked closely with L-Acoustics Regional Sales Manager B.J. Shavers to design a ground-stacked system that would work like a touring system in matching the room, and yet still be suitable for volunteers to set up, tear down, and store on-site. Most importantly, it would deliver the recognizable signature sound of Faith Church.
Designed to be portable
Working with Shavers, 3G designed a portable left-right system for the West Palm Beach location that features three L-acoustics ARCS Focus loudspeakers per side. With 15-degree by 90-degree directivity that is scalable to 360 degrees by 90 degrees by 15-degree increments, ARCS Focus elements are designed for quick set-up and easy flying as either horizontal or vertical arrays. This provided an easily scalable constant curvature line source system from 55 Hz to 20 kHz. The design for the mains at the West Palm Beach campus specifically targets the seating areas and keeps sound energy away from the room’s reflective surfaces.
3G installed three L-Acoustics SB18m subwoofers each with a single 18-inch speaker at each side of the stage to provide a powerful low end, as well as four compact L-Acoustics X8 eight-inch coaxial speakers, installed and aligned, to provide even front fill. An additional consideration was for the flexibility of a design that could be ground-stackable or flown.
The all L-Acoustics system is powered by three of the company’s 96 kHz/32 bit DSP, Ethernet-enabled LA4X amplifier controllers that provide four channels of class D amplification with each channel, advertised to generate 1,000 watts of power at 8 or 4 ohms for 200 ms. In addition to a comprehensive preset library and fast start-up time, the amplifier controllers include LA Network Manager 2 software that provides the features of remote control and active system monitoring.
Reaping the benefits
As Faith Church locations have moved to standardize systems, benefits beyond just great sound are being noted. “With just a bit of training, volunteers can more easily move between campus locations,” notes Cring. “They can step into technology they recognize with some level of consistency and don’t find themselves starting from scratch. Plus, the training itself is easier.” Both Cring and Machado see the benefits of consistent hardware and audio designs across campuses making for fewer problems and easier fixes. “You are not having to figure out a new system every time there is a problem,” notes Cring. “Often, you’ve solved it before and know where to look.” He also reminds clients that investing similarly with multiple campuses offers the benefit of making manufacturers and vendors more attentive. “You can have better relationships and more buying power,” he notes.
Jerrod Cring, Head of Sales, 3G Productions Inc.
Cring admits that the upfront investment to get professional and consistent audio can be considerable for many churches. “Worship centers have been transformed into performance venues and need to be treated as such. For expanding churches, these are often hard lessons learned,” he notes. “It sounds cliché, but you do get what you pay for, and we see that these are investments that pay for themselves over time. ”
A closer look at the technology of successful multi-campus churches, like Faith Church, suggest that worshippers do notice the difference.
