The church wanted to keep a 1,000-seat sanctuary intimate-sounding, and Bose® RoomMatch® loudspeakers and PowerMatch® amplifiers were able to do just that, filling the room with only six modules while covering every seat perfectly
Framingham, Massachusetts, January 28, 2014 – The Harvest Bible Church in Cypress, Texas, had a challenging agenda: allow its 1,000-seat sanctuary to have an intimate ambience yet still have both speech and music fill the entire space intelligibly and coherently, despite a relatively low 18-foot ceiling and highly reflective surfaces on the walls and floor. And one more criterion: keep the PA system’s profile minimal and as invisible as possible. It might have seemed difficult to meet all of these goals, but a RoomMatch® loudspeaker system from Bose® Professional Systems was just the right solution.
Covenant Communications, an AV systems designer and integrator in Houston, used two RM12020 modules, one RM12010 module and an RMS215 subwoofer in each of two L/R arrays, all powered by three Bose PowerMatch® PM8500N eight-channel amplifiers. That was all it took to fulfill all of the needs of this complex acoustical space.
“The six compression drivers in each cabinet from two arrays provided all the directivity we needed to tailor the sound coverage to all of the seats in the worship hall, and we were able to do that without further exciting this challenging acoustical environment with more cabinets yielding higher SPL’s,” observes Joe Smart, the Sales Manager for Covenant Communications and the system’s designer. Noting the concrete flooring, the copious amounts of highly reflective solid drywall, and the fact that there was no acoustical treatment in the ceiling space, he says, “A predictable coverage pattern for the sound was absolutely critical. And that’s why the RoomMatch speakers were the perfect solution: We were able to cover the space consistently and coherently with a minimum number of boxes.”
Smart says he was introduced to the Bose RoomMatch system when his Bose sales representative took him to hear it in the Broken Arrow Performing Arts Center installation in Oklahoma. “I was greatly surprised and impressed by the even response of the off-axis high frequencies of the system,” he recalls. “I left there feeling confident that I could specify a RoomMatch system for the Harvest Bible Church project, to meet their challenging space and acoustical needs. I talked to the customer and flipped the spec within a week of hearing the RoomMatch system because I was never quite settled on how to solve some of the room dilemmas, but I was confident of what I heard in Broken Arrow. Without the RoomMatch loudspeakers, I would have had to use a ton of boxes and delay lines to achieve the same coherency that we get with just six RoomMatch modules. We’re getting all the benefits of a line array without having to hang more than we wanted to. There is a certain genius in the range of options for putting the boxes together.”
In addition to the RoomMatch modules used in the sanctuary, Covenant Communications also installed 70-volt Bose DS40 ceiling speakers outside of the worship center, to cover overflow areas, networked to, and powered by, the PowerMatch amplifiers. “I’ve gotten more compliments from the end user on this system than other projects I can remember. The system is really musical, and we did it all with a minimum of hardware,” says Smart. “It was definitely a case of less really being more.”
