Pearland, TX (March 29, 2021)—First Baptist Church recently underwent an extensive facility upgrade to its sound reinforcement capabilities in order to reach all worshipers in its 1,200-seat sanctuary. DiTech AV LLC of El Campo, TX, an AV design/build firm that services the worship and commercial markets, came in to design and install the system and opted for a variety of speakers from DAS Audio.
DiTech AV owner Paul Guthrie explained, “The overall width of the space is 150 feet with a depth of 140 feet. The stage runs the width of the room with a center 30-foot thrust that projects out in front of the stage area. Seating is fixed with a capacity for 1,200 people and the congregation area has an incline, or rake, of 18 feet from front to rear. Services are a blended style of both traditional and contemporary, but lean more toward the contemporary side. There is both a praise band and an 8-member praise vocal team that provide a very uplifting worship experience.”
The new loudspeaker system deployed by Guthrie and his crew includes three DAS Audio Vantec-20A active curve sourced line array enclosures that are flown dead center—facing straight out into the room—directly above the stage thrust. There is also a fourth Vantec-20A that serves as a center delay speaker. This is positioned 70 feet back into the room. Directly to the left and right of the center loudspeaker cluster, there are two flown clusters with each hang consisting of five DAS Aero-12A powered line array elements. These two loudspeaker clusters are angled to face the left and right sides of the sanctuary.
Cornerstone Church Reaches Out
For low frequency support, the DiTech AV team deployed two DAS Audio Event-218A powered subwoofers. These two enclosures are positioned in the center area above the line array clusters and among the stage truss.
“Several factors led us to choose DAS,” said Guthrie. “Ultimately, speech intelligibility was a crucial concern, because without this, the message gets lost. We also wanted the system to be very musical and live sounding. We wanted the audience to not only hear the music, but to feel it as well and, in this regard, the DAS system really delivers. Also, the integrated rigging and hardware made the installation process go very smoothly. The entire installation is very clean in appearance.”
The new DAS sound system has been up and operational since January; Omar Garcia, the worship and evangelism pastor, reported, “After service, I had a church member ask what we had done, or how we fixed the sound, because it sounded phenomenal. He said the music sounded great and you could clearly hear Pastor David Adams. Pastor David is happy because he can come down off the stage and get closer to the audience without any feedback. With this new system, we could host concerts if we wanted and not have any worries.”
DiTech AV LLC • www.ditechav.com
DAS Audio • www.dasaudio.com
