LEXINGTON, KY - Northeast Christian Church in Lexington, KY is the proud owner of a
newly constructed 2,400-seat sanctuary
which was completed in the nick of time:
The $11 million building replaces the
church’s existing sanctuary, a multipurpose
space, which had
become increasingly
unsuitable
as a worship environment
and
was unable to
accommodate the church’s growth. With
the construction of the new fan-shaped
space with a balcony, however, came the
need to fill it with sound, and the responsibility
of specifying and installing an effective
audio system fell on to the shoulders
of
CMG Audio Visual of Canton, GA,
CMG president Jeremy Alison explains
that his firm became involved with the project
in February 2006 after a guest musician
of the church contacted a member of
CMG’s board of directors who had been his
FOH engineer for several concerts, and adds
that the blank canvas with which the team
worked was a good one.
“We had the privilege
of working with two of the best architects
in this market,” he says.
“They really
understood the need for proper sound reinforcement
and good room acoustics, and
worked closely with us early in the design
phase to develop solutions that fit the needs
of the church.” In particular, the
CMG team,
led by project manager
Jon Ostrander, worked closely with
Jerry Herndon of JHA,
the architect and owner’s representative.
As might be fitting for a house of worship,
the system designers took a leap of
faith and spec’d what would become the world’s first installation of a
Renkus-Heinz
RHAON-equipped, self-powered audio system.
The
RHAON (Renkus-Heinz Audio
Operations Network) technology provides
a digital signal path with remote monitoring
over a
Cat-5-based CobraNet network,
via a
MediaMatrix Nion distribution processor,
to the loudspeaker drivers.
Despite the
digital system, however, the mixing environment
for the church’s all-volunteer audio
team had to be strictly analog.
“The
church’s sound volunteers did not want
digital consoles,” continues
Alison, “but
we had to have three splits for FOH, monitors
and broadcast, and we wanted a digital
back end both because of the size of
the space and limited space for amplifier
racks. We chose Midas Verona and Sienna
consoles for their warm sound and ease of
use for volunteers. We chose the Media
Matrix Nion for reliability and to provide
CobraNet distribution, taking analog signals
from the desks, processing and distributing
them—via D-Link network switches
for CobraNet and control traffic—to the RHAON self-powered cabinet network.
That combination allowed the entire digital
back end to be remotely monitored.”
The final factor in the decision was, he
says, the musical nature of the church’s
worship services, in which a contemporary
service style is delivered through southern
gospel and bluegrass by a sizeable band,
fully DI’d, a large choir and some orchestral
elements:
“It’s a full live experience, so the
fidelity of the system was very important.”
The main house system centers on
Renkus-Heinz’s ST Series, with an “exploded”
central cluster of five
ST9/64R cabinets.
These are augmented by a 6-cabinet
ST4/64R balcony delay system, with a halfdozen
SG81-2Rs Sygma boxes as an under
balcony delay system. A trio of the
smaller
Sygma SG81-2Rs serve as front
fills, while six
PN212-SUB R house subwoofers
tackle the low end. The system is
completed by five more Sygma cabinets,
the
SG121-52R, which form the stage
monitor system, and a pair of
SG151-52Rs as the choir room system.
