At First Baptist Church in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla,, All Pro Sound (Pensicola, Fla.) performed a re-installation, using Turbosound loudspeakers to get the sound right. “We knew there were some issues from the beginning, especially due to speaker placement,” Jim Stenson, senior designer with All Pro Sound, says. “It got more frustrating for the church over time because a big part of the congregation couldn’t hear or understand what was being said.”
Hidden behind gondolas in the ceiling, the church’s previously installed loudspeakers didn’t provide near the coverage that was required for the auditorium, which seats about 750 in a main floor and balcony area. Increasingly reliant on the musical instrumental elements of contemporary worship, as well as a 100-person choir and a pastor who needs to be heard, the church found the sound system was either not reaching some seating areas or was doing a poor job in areas it did cover. Stenson’s immediate recommendation was to do away with the hidden-speaker layout in favor of an entirely new configuration.
After building an EASE model of the room and inserting similar loudspeakers from three manufacturers in a bid to achieve the required +/- 4dB performance for the seating area, Stenson settled on a solution that employed five Turbosound THL-811.3 speakers in an exploded cluster.
“On paper, the best performer was the THL-811, a trapezoidal mid-high device that has a precise coverage pattern in a small-footprint enclosure that blended in very nicely with the architecture,” Stenson continues. “As expected, they performed extremely well in real life.”
Two other Turbosound loudspeaker models were used to cover the auditorium. In addition to front-fill speakers and subwoofers supplied by another manufacturer, All Pro selected two Turbosound products to solve balcony-related coverage challenges. To cover the upper area of the balcony, which seats about 75, Stenson selected two Turbosound TCS-40 passive, full-range, two-way speakers. As under-balcony fills, Stenson specified three Turbosound TCS-30s, another passive, full-range, two-way speaker.
Six of the three-way, bi-amped, full-range speakers were mounted in a cluster about 26 feet above the front of the platform to cover six seating areas on the main floor. In addition, Stenson installed three Turbosound TQ-425 front-loaded, vented subwoofers. Mounted behind the platform facade, the subs are specifically engineered to extend the low-frequency response of the companion TQ-440s. “The contemporary nature of their worship style required a three-way enclosure capable of a higher sound pressure level,” he says.
For more information on Turbosound, please go to www.turbosound.com.
