Guided by Lead Pastor Rev. Adiel DePano, St. Andrews by the Sea United Methodist is a multi-generational church with a wide range of ministries designed to appeal to its varied congregation. The church welcomes people from all walks of life and to address its diverse membership, it recently elected to upgrade its sound reinforcement capabilities. To ensure the best possible sound, they deployed new loudspeakers drawn from the TrueLine catalog of Greensboro, NC-based WorxAudio Technologies, a division of PreSonus Audio Electronics.
PS Audio Video of San Diego, CA, an AV integration firm with a focus on the worship market, was contracted to handle the installation of the church’s new loudspeaker system. After meeting with church officials to determine their objectives for the facility upgrade, company owner Paul Svenson, who also serves as its designer and installation coordinator, ultimately elected to install two WorxAudio TrueLine X3i-P powered all-in- one compact line arrays and a TrueLine X118i-P/D subwoofer. He discussed the project and his reason for deploying WorxAudio equipment.
“St. Andrews by-the- Sea United Methodist’s sanctuary is a wide, somewhat fan-shaped space,” Svenson explained. “With a 30-foot stage that faces into the width of the room, there is a distance of 65 feet to the rear wall, which spans an area of 92 feet. The space incorporates a balcony and there remain 2 – 3 rows of pews under the balcony overhang. Seating is fixed pews, with carpeted isles and a front floor area. They have both traditional and contemporary services, so music reproduction capabilities were every bit as important as clear speech intelligibility. Because of the room’s design, we needed loudspeakers with wide dispersion and an extremely controlled vertical pattern. The WorxAudio X3i-P meets these requirements very well”.
The two X3i-P enclosures were custom finished to match the church’s interior and they were then positioned on the left and right rear wall of the stage area adjacent to the video monitors. Each box was hung from a single point via a custom rigging frame Svenson designed. These frames are constructed of Unistrut and 1.5-inch schedule 40 pipe that was powder coated to match the room’s aesthetics. The frames are mounted to the walls 12 feet left and right of center stage. The enclosures are hung from a pipe drop to the WorxAudio Minibeam rigging hardware, which is mounted to the top of each box. The X118 subwoofer is on the stage against the rear wall behind where the praise band’s bass player and drummer are typically located.
When queried about those attributes that made the WorxAudio loudspeakers so well suited for this project, Svenson offered the following thoughts. “The X3’s wide horizontal dispersion and well defined vertical throw enabled us to cover this space with just the two enclosures,” he said. “I’ve also been very impressed by the sound quality and construction of the equipment. Equally important, the WorxAudio Minibeam and pipe-oriented rigging hardware made installing these loudspeakers very smooth and easy. I’m also a big fan of PreSonus—WorxAudio’s parent company. We used a PreSonus StudioLive AVB48AI mixing console on this job and being able to coordinate all this through a single company was yet another benefit”.
Svenson was equally complimentary of WorxAudio’s customer and technical support services, “The WorxAudio people were very helpful assisting us with EASE drawings based on the room as well as making the necessary adjustments until we arrived at an optimal installation plan. The loudspeakers were built perfectly—painted to match and delivered ahead of original projections”.
St. Andrews by-the- Sea United Methodist’s new loudspeaker system was installed in early August and immediately placed into service. Svenson reports the project has been extremely successful. “Since the installation’s completion, the congregation has been very pleased and impressed with the sound and appearance of the system,” he said. “The band leader and other musicians were also extremely happy with the way the system performed. When I asked if they wanted to run the service as loud as the rehearsal, the band leader said, ‘We’ve never been able to run it loud before without distortion, feedback, and problems.’ The bottom line is that the new loudspeaker system is meeting—and exceeding—everyone’s expectations”.
