Resurrection Life Church, a rapidly growing nondenominational congregation located in Grandville, Michigan, recently completed a $35 million expansion project that added 212,000 square feet of space to its facilities in the form of a new 4,300-seat sanctuary, 350-seat chapel, large choir rehearsal area and numerous other support rooms.
Worship services typically feature up to a dozen ensemble singers onstage backed by a band with an eight-piece horn section and 200-voice choir. With this in mind, the church earmarked just over $1 million of its construction budget for audio systems and turned to Dallas-based Acoustic Dimensions to specify a sound reinforcement system.
Senior consultant/project manager Robert Rose and consultant Ryan Knox designed a system for an extremely tight space. Using L-Acoustics’ SoundVision 3-D acoustical modeling software, Knox recommended a loudspeaker system that employed three arrays each comprised of five Kudo enclosures. Flown just below the catwalk, the bottom cabinet of each array neatly hangs a mere three inches above the top of a large gondola containing three giant projection screens and the stage lighting grid.
Low-frequency reinforcement for the system is supplemented by three SB218 subwoofers, also flown above the gondola, as well as by eight additional SB218s housed in bunkers beneath the stage.
“Kudo is one of the very few line array loudspeaker products that would actually fit in the limited space we had available,” says Rose. “The fact that these enclosures can be splayed more than traditional line array cabinets while maintaining coherent summation gave us a fairly deep throw from a compact array. Plus, by using the box’s adjustable vanes [‘K-Louvers’], we were able to custom-tailor the dispersion width to best cover the room, which is not symmetrical. We would have been hard pressed to find another loudspeaker system that would have worked quite as well.”
Resurrection Life technical director of audio systems Cliff Rosenberg is also impressed with the Kudo system’s performance. “I think that this is the easiest P.A. I’ve ever run,” he says. “I find that I don’t have to do drastic channel EQ on the console to have everything sound amazingly nice. In going from our old loudspeaker system in our previous sanctuary to this one, I’m finally getting all the things I never could hear before clearly out in the mix. The overall clarity is stunning, and now I can very distinctly hear every single element in the band. Also, the low-end of the SB218 subs is tight and full, which helps the band’s rhythm section really connect with the congregation. Operating this system feels like mixing on a giant set of studio monitors!”
For more information, visit www.l-acoustics.com, www.acousticdimensions.com and www.reslife.org.
