Daphne, AL (July 28, 2015)—In February, Daphne, Alabama’s City Hope Church opened the doors to its new worship facility—a new 35,000-square-foot building, of which approximately 75 percent is devoted to the worship center. Audio can be heard in every corner of it due to a sizable sound system installed by Springville, Alabama-based ESB Group Inc.
ESB Group Project Manager Nic Taylor and his colleagues proposed an L-Acoustics Kara rig for the facility—now there’s 16 Kara(i) split into left and right arrays of eight enclosures, each flanked on the outside edge by a sub array of three SB18i flown in a cardioid configuration. Two SB28 per side under the stage anchor the low-end reinforcement, while eight tiny coaxial 5XT cubes mounted into the face of the stage deliver front fill. Two 12XTi enclosures serve as rear fills, with four ARCS Focus and four ARCS Wide functioning as side fills and delays, respectively. All systems are powered and processed by a total of nine LA4X amplified controllers, with the exception of the SB28s, which are run from a single LA8.
According to City Hope Pastor of Production Scotty Ard, “It’s tremendous to see the congregation so engaged. We wanted to make sure that the new audio system didn’t become a distraction, and it hasn’t—it sounds smooth and natural. We are pushing the mix six decibels hotter, to around 96 dB, and everything is sounding very pleasing to the ear—far superior to the performance we had grown accustomed to with our previous system.”
L-Acoustics, Inc.
