Covering 180-degrees at Purpose Church
Published: WORSHIP
USA: Purpose Church, located in Pomona, California, 48km east of Los Angeles, recently decided to upgrade a 25-year-old sound system. The fan-shaped church sanctuary, with seating for 1,800 to 2,000 worshippers, features a wrap-around balcony that necessitates a 180-degree soundfield. The space is made up primarily of hard, flat surfaces, with little or no acoustic treatment. The room layout called for sound reinforcement with custom-tailored coverage, easily defined by the user; the church was interested in a system with the ability to vary coverage from one service style to another, ideally with presets to simplify the process.
Peter Wilson, audio tech director for Purpose Church, and Jeremy Rynders, audio/acoustic system designer, researched sound system options that would meet the HOW’s needs. ‘The room is wider than it is deep and features a stage with a band/orchestra space in front of it,’ explains Mr Wilson. ‘We hoped to put in a system that could easily adapt from full room coverage, to just main seating without the balcony or even dial it in smaller for more intimate events.’
Mr Rynders ultimately specified a left-centre-right system with the left and right arrays made up of two independently aimed columns each – one column with six EAW Anna modules and the other with three. The centre cluster consists of two Anna columns, each three high. A total of 24 Anna modules are in use. Anna’s 100-degree horizontal dispersion was paramount to providing the coverage the seating area required, according to Mr Rynders.
‘The system is a true left-right-centre system with each array creating a custom shaped 180-degree horizontal coverage pattern,’ explains Mr Rynders. ‘EAW’s Resolution software is used to change the adaptive coverage patterns for different seating requirements and for different services. All of the vocals and spoken word go through the centre, which covers the entire room. Left and right are music – true stereo from farthest left to farthest right.’
Mr Rynders and Mr Wilson worked closely with EAW’s application engineering team to build the church model in Resolution and create the custom presets that would allow the church team to adapt the system for a variety of applications/seating configurations.
Anna modules hang straight, without any vertical splay or array curvature, a concept that EAW says allow the left and right arrays to be hung high enough to keep the line of sight for the video screens open while still serving the audience seating directly below. Coverage patterns are determined by onboard DSP controlling each loudspeaker component individually. The centre cluster at Purpose Church is located behind a screen, keeping it largely hidden from view. According to EAW, with Resolution 2 control, the church had much more flexibility in the placement of the arrays than with a traditional point source or mechanically-articulated line array solution.
‘At one point, we looked at building a point source cluster that would do what Anna did, and realised it would take days to achieve such seamless coverage – plus more work, more amplifiers, more fine-tuning and it would not be better or as versatile,’ says Mr Rynder. ‘So why do it? This was the ideal solution for this room and it gave the church exactly what it wanted.
‘What makes what we do here really challenging is that we do three different services designed to attract three totally different audiences – choir, contemporary, and alt-contemporary. We have two different bands and we don’t have a lot of time to sound check,’ Mr Rynder concludes. ‘So what we pull off every Sunday is complicated. Having a system that meets all of that criteria in a single day is impressive. It’s a unique challenge and Anna met it.’