Quest for great sound ends for Salvation Army

To meet the challenge of a typically reverberant church interior, Quest has supplied its new HPi110 enclosures that are specifically designed for difficult acoustic environments. ‘Primarily we designed it for churches,’ said Quest Engineering’s Frank Andrewartha. ‘Your average church has highly reflective surfaces, and often the best place to hang the PA is somewhere that doesn’t have the structural capability to hold it. Room reverberation will degrade the performance of the best PA if you’re half way up the room and you’re outside of critical distance. You’ll get lots of reflections.’

Accordingly, Quest has designed this system as a way of focusing the acoustic energy very sharply. ‘You have wide dispersion at the bottom of the box and narrow dispersion at the top of the box,’ continued Mr Andrewartha. ‘It’s asymmetrical in its coverage, the idea being that you can put up either an array or a single box and still keep the sound away from the walls and the ceiling.’

The HPi array is also very lightweight, making installation relatively easy – the system is flown from the existing hanging points without the need for expensive structural changes to the building. The highly intelligible high frequency reproduction greatly assists voice duplication, while coverage to the whole church is even and of similar sound pressure level regardless of seat location. The entire church floor area is covered by just three HPi110 speakers, plus a pair of 15-inch QM600S subs.

A contemporary service features music provided by a rock band with a brass section, so the HPi-110’s 600W RMS continuous power handling suits the full range of styles from traditional brass to contemporary Christian rock. The system, installed by local company Billy Hyde Commercial Installations, was as part of complete A/V upgrade.

www.questaudio.net