Florida HOW overcomes sound shortcomings with WorxAudio

With three services each Sunday—two of which are contemporary in nature— First Christian Church has a vibrant worship programme that caters to a diverse congregation. After enduring lackluster performance from its sound system for far too long, the decision was made to upgrade its sanctuary’s facilities. The church was seeking a new system capable of delivering a high level of speech intelligibility and first-rate music reproduction.

Cape Coral-based Creative Sound Solutions, LLC was contracted to design and implement the church’s new sound reinforcement system. Rob Robinson, general manager and co-owner of Creative Sound Solutions, managed the First Christian Church project. He discussed the challenges that led to the deployment of the WorxAudio X3-P compact line array.

‘First Christian Church’s sanctuary seats roughly 500 people and is 24m wide by 15m deep with the stage/pulpit area facing into the width of the room. As a result, the sanctuary is considerably wider than it is deep. This required a loudspeaker system with broad horizontal dispersion in order to provide consistent coverage from side to side as well as front to rear,’ explained Mr Robinson. ‘The lack of consistent sound coverage with the previous sound system created a number of issues, most notably, the inability of the congregation to understand what was being said. Because of this, speech intelligibility was a crucial factor. Services are nowhere near as meaningful if people can’t understand what’s being said.

‘Music also plays a vital role in the church’s worship services,’ he continued. ‘With a five-piece praise band and a vocal team of roughly the same size, the new sound system had to have equally capable music reproduction characteristics. The WorxAudio X3-P line array is unique in that it is a three-module, all-in-one compact system with extremely broad – 160-degrees – horizontal dispersion and excellent music reproduction characteristics. After consulting with Hugh Sarvis at WorxAudio Technologies, we determined that a central cluster – positioned 6m over the pulpit area – would serve the room nicely.’

Since the deployment of the new system, Mr Robinson reports that it has had an extremely positive impact. ‘Because of the X3-P’s dispersion characteristics, we were able to cover every inch of the space. This system effectively eliminated the dead spots inherent in the previous sound system and, now, there is great sound quality and high speech intelligibility everywhere you sit. Ken Wagner, the church’s media director, was really impressed with the fact that no matter where he walks throughout the room, sound quality is remarkably consistent, clear, and free or dropouts. The new WorxAudio system has been generating rave reviews – and for us, that’s the best compliment of all.’

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