Redlands reboots audio system
Published: WORSHIP
US: As part of a full rebuild of its sanctuary, Redlands Seventh Day Adventist Church in Southern California has upgraded its sound system. The upgrade is based around Turbosound loudspeakers and an Allen & Heath iLive-T112 digital mixing console.
The sanctuary is approximately 37m long, with 6m ceilings and a balcony, and typically hosts services that use traditional pipe organ and grand piano while incorporating both orchestral and contemporary elements such as strings, horns and acoustic or electric guitars. The church’s use of drama also means that speech intelligibility is another key requirement.
Senior pastor Zach Thorp engaged independent system designer/installer Brad McCoy to lead the project. ‘Looking at the church’s needs and budget, this was easily the best choice,’ said Mr McCoy. ‘The Turbosound speakers are very musical, and the iLive console has the ability to handle complex programs but can also be operated successfully by the volunteer mixers – the best of both worlds.’
Mr McCoy specified an iLive-T112 mixing surface paired with the iDR-48 MixRack, with 32 inputs and 16 outputs plus an Aviom card for the personal monitoring system. Mr McCoy points to the convenience of the iLive’s remote MixRack and Cat-5 digital snake system as key elements in the mixer’s design.
‘First, everything you need is included. All the mic preamps, DSP and I/O are located in a single MixRack up by the stage, which is incredibly convenient,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s no need to run big copper snakes, so infrastructure becomes very easy to deal with.”
The speakers selected for the main array are the TCS-1061 series, the installation version of the Flex Array line. ‘We designed a mono four-speaker array, which was the only way to go in a long, narrow room like this,’ continued Mr McCoy. The line array’s top three boxes are the TCS-1061/75, with 75-degree horizontal dispersion model, topping a single TCS-1061/100 for wider dispersion across the front rows. Flying immediately behind the array is a Turbosound TFA-600L subwoofer, which fills the room with a single 18-inch driver. Small side transepts on either side of the stage are each covered by a single ceiling-mounted TCS-611 sidefill speaker.
To assure even coverage, the line array is split into three zones and biamped. The top speaker handles the long throw to the balcony, the middle two blanket the main seating area and the bottom speaker covers the front. Two of the power amps are bridged to provide four channels of 2,500W, which handles the low frequency drivers in the array in three zones, plus the subwoofer. The last DSP amp powers the high-frequency array drivers, with the last channel dedicated to the sidefill speakers.
On stage, a set of four Turbosound NuQ-8DP self-powered speakers were added to augment the church’s pre-existing Aviom personal monitor system. ‘This new system works for us on every level,’ added senior pastor Zach Thorp. ‘I judge things on how they sound, and the Turbosound array sounds fantastic all the way to the last pew. We’re also very happy with the clean look of the integration, which was important to us. For our sound techs, the iLive has much better ease of use than our previous digital desk. They picked it up really quickly after some training from Brad. And I love the fact that everything we wanted was already included. Allen & Heath was really the best choice in terms of capability, convenience and cost. We couldn’t be happier with this system.’