Hoover, AL (November 4, 2019)—Christ the King Anglican Church recently moved into an existing church building in Hoover, Alabama, and renovated the facility in the process. Aiding that effort, MediaMerge of Birmingham designed and installed a Dante-enabled sound system in the sanctuary, based around Renkus-Heinz IC Live-X line arrays.
“The sanctuary seats about 300 people and has flat floor level seating and a large balcony in the rear with raked seating,” said MediaMerge system designer Jason Vieira. “The balcony juts out about a third of the way into the room, so half of the audience is under the balcony, and it has a big face, so there would have been a lot of reflections if we didn’t beam steer around it. One of the main reasons we chose Renkus-Heinz steerable arrays is their ability to steer around that balcony face and still cover the audience both in and below the balcony.”
Answering the problem, the applied acoustic treatment along the balcony back wall, which is about 50 feet from the stage, but the RH line arrays’ beam steering was also put to use, as Vieira recalled: “The room is a triangle, so backstage comes to a point, and then the angle opens up to about 100 feet wide. Underneath the balcony is drop ceiling, so there were a lot of challenges that we met with beam steering.”
MediaMerge installed a left/right pair of ICL-X modules, arrayed with ICL-XS extended LF modules, all custom-painted white. “They’re mounted on brick, about 15 feet up, so they pop visually,” Vieira said, “but they look a lot more elegant than black columns would have, and there are other white accents in the room.”
All system processing is done within the arrays, programmed using Renkus-Heinz RHAON II software. “RHAON II is pretty straightforward to use,” Vieira said. “It did a really good job of user-friendly beam steering. When we first installed the system, we probably had 10 beams per side, but Renkus-Heinz updated the software since then, and we were able to redo the coverage with just two or three beams per side. The system knew where the lobes needed to go.”
Renkus-Heinz • www.renkus-heinz.com
