When Transformation Church purchased the Spirit Bank Events Center in Bixby, OK, a 35,000 square-foot space originally designed as a professional basketball arena, the church’s associate production director, Keithan Carroll, and audio director, Paul Ericson, were determined to create a worship space that would feel intimate despite the Center’s size. “Even in a space with close to 4,000 seats, the tonality, characteristics, and all those little nuances of the audio experience are important,” says Carroll. “Taken together, that audio information creates a frame of reference for worship–the feeling you get from one space to another.” To build out their flagship audio system at Bixby, the team wanted an audio solution that would reach people emotionally, as well as be repeatable in rooms of different sizes. After exploring the options, they found the range of products from L-Acoustics would not only meet their needs, but also their budget.
“...we walked the room, and realized that it sounds just like front-of-house, everywhere.” – Keithan Carroll, associate production director, Transformation Church
Since moving into the Center in 2019, Transformation Church has made a number of notable improvements to the arena including building a broadcast video suite, adding cameras and other video gear, as well as significant changes to the space to improve coverage and quality of sound. This included both acoustically treating and redesigning the space. “The acoustic treatment of the room involved actually putting up walls inside the arena space —- in part to help isolate the bleed outside of the building into a neighboring housing development,” says Ericson. “Of course, the need for treatment to improve sound quality for those in attendance is obvious if you have spent any time in an arena and experienced how echoey those spaces can be.”
While the acoustic properties of the room had improved, coverage was still a problem with the church's existing sound system. So a rented left-right system from L-Acoustics was brought in while the audio team investigated alternatives for the 3,800-seat space. The specifications for the new audio system were considerable. “Our band utilizes well over a hundred inputs,” notes Ericson. “There’s typically a lot of synths and keyboards, and a full complement of drums and percussion on stage. That can be as many as 32 channels of just drums and, then, up to 20 or so vocalists, plus guitars and bass. That’s a lot of individual information happening, making the ability to pan in a space to separate things sonically almost a necessity.”
Carroll and Ericson worked with integrators and manufacturers to explore potential system designs for the Bixby space that would provide sufficient coverage and consistent low-end, while delivering the necessary headroom to support the church’s remarkable gospel style. “Once we started getting into those conversations, it became clear that to deploy those solutions would actually cost the same as an immersive L-ISA system from L-Acoustics,” recalls Carroll.
“Then we walked the room, and realized that it sounds just like front of house, everywhere.”—Keithan Carroll, associate production director, Transformation Church
To experience immersive audio for themselves, Carroll and Ericson were invited to Resort World’s Las Vegas L-ISA installation. “We were standing at front-of-house for Katie Perry’s show, where, of course, it sounded amazing,” recalls Carroll. “Then we walked the room, and realized that it sounds just like front-of-house, everywhere.” The team shared the experience with church leadership knowing it was something important to consider. “It also fits well with the musical direction of the church,” notes Ericson. “We felt that L-Acoustics L-ISA processing could provide the clarity and separation for all those different musical elements happening on stage for us and allow all of them to translate into the room.”
While the audio team at Transformation Church is poised to install a permanent L-Acoustics loudspeaker system with L-ISA processing in Bixby arena space, the goal is to provide great sound and the emotional connection in the other meeting spaces at Transformation Church. “There’s a vision at the church to open other campuses,” Carroll adds. “So we were looking for solutions that can work from an experience standpoint, but also from a budget standpoint. We felt L-Acoustics did that really well. From their flagship line-array systems down to their point-source boxes, we felt the experience replicated really well. So if we had a space that was 500 seats it would have the same feeling as our 5000-seat space.”
Carroll concludes, “It’s clear that the future of installed audio is all about creating the immersive experience–a common feeling especially important for a worship space that is recognizable, memorable, and very much the room’s personality. That wound up driving our vision for the Bixby arena space and led us to decide on the L-Acoustic L-ISA technology.”
