Johannesburg, South Africa (November 5, 2013)—The Rhema Bible Church in Randburg recently upgraded the sound system for its large, 180-dregree bowl-shaped auditorium.
When looking for a new system, the church’s pastor Ray McCauley turned to audio consultants SoundGP and Harman Professional South African distributor Wild & Marr (Pty) Ltd. “The previous system was unable to cope with the new high-energy content being generated in many forms, from live music to AV,” stated Pastor Alan Plant, who heads logistics for Sunday services. “Due to its age, the speech coverage was uneven and not up to the level of consistency required to ensure a pleasant listening environment.”
Wild and Marr chose JBL’s VTX line array system powered by Crown I-Tech 12000 HD power amplifiers. The system is controlled by the latest version of JBL HiQnet Performance Manager software. The system needed to be transformed into one that communicated to a fast-growing, youth-focused audience.
To fulfill the church’s requirements, Wild and Marr outfitted the auditorium with four arrays of six JBL VTX V25 loudspeakers and two JBL VerTec VT4886 subcompact enclosures per array acting as down fills. The system also includes three JBL VTX S28 subwoofers per side in a cardioid array. Eight JBL STX815M loudspeakers were also used to provide delays to the rear seating area.
By using a specially designed MADI routing solution, the church now has expanded routing flexibility and is capable of future expansion. This is a first-of-its-kind solution in such an environment, enabling the sound operators to mix 96 channels from the Soundcraft Vi6 stage box mic pre-amplifiers. Sixty-four of these channels are made available to the monitor Soundcraft Vi1 or the Soundcraft Vi1 in the broadcast/production facility as well as the permanent recording PC, which also doubles as a virtual sound check playback device.
The Soundcraft Aviom expansion card provides flexibility of routing to any console bus feed. This digital signal backbone also provides tie lines for signal interconnection between the various consoles while passing AES/EBU signal to the main PA via the MADI router. An analogue signal routing system provides redundancy from the main PA ensuring signal transport to the Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers.
“The new technology incorporated into the D2 driver, as well as other innovations, like decreased component gaps and structural changes, make seamless audio interconnectivity when moving around the auditorium a priority, thus lending itself to extremely smooth and accurate audio distribution,” explained Gustav Teitge.
Harman
www.harman.com
