Dedicated to spreading the Gospel of the life-changing grace, power, and love of Jesus Christ, Epic Church International is led by Senior Pastors John and Ilena Wagner. With a mission to change lives for the better, church officials recently elected to upgrade the sound reinforcement facilities in their sanctuary. This ultimately led to the installation of loudspeakers from the Aero Series catalog of DAS Audio.
Advanced Audio of New York, a full-service AV design / build firm that, in addition to its installation business, operates an event sound services division, was contracted to design and deploy the new sound system at Epic Church. After consulting with church management, Burton A. Ishmael, Advanced Audio’s Owner / Operator and chief systems designer, ultimately penned a system consisting of DAS Audio Aero-20A compact line array enclosures plus UX-218A and UX-221A powered subwoofers. He discussed the project.
“The sanctuary at Epic Church is really quite impressive as well as challenging,” Ishmael reports. “The room is fan shaped and includes a wrap-around (180-degree) balcony. The space measures 150 feet at the maximum spread and the length of the space is 120 feet—with a ceiling height of 40 feet. Seating is fixed and cushioned, and the room’s capacity is approximately 2,300 people. Services at Epic Church are contemporary in nature and there are both a praise team of vocalists as well as a full instrumental backup band. Because of this, it was crucial for the new sound system to not only have excellent speech intelligibility characteristics, it also needed first rate music reproduction and the dynamic capability to deliver the full frequency spectrum as well as consistent frequency response with sufficient SPL throughout the space. Further, the ability to control and monitor the loudspeaker system at FOH was a requirement.”
To address these requirements, Ishmael and his team deployed three main loudspeaker clusters—left, center, right—with each cluster consisting of six DAS Aero-20A enclosures. Further out into the room, there are also two delay loudspeaker clusters for the left- and right-side balcony area—each consisting of four Aero-20A enclosures. For low frequency support, the Advanced Audio team flew eight DAS UX-218A subwoofers—four each for the left and right sides, behind the left and right Aero-20A clusters. There are also four UX-221A ultra low frequency subwoofers. These are ground stacked in front of the stage, two enclosures each for the left and right sides.
When queried about those characteristics that made the Aero Series loudspeakers the ideal fit for this project, Ishmael offered the following comments. “The ability to reproduce music naturally with wide dynamic range while still having excellent speech intelligibility were critical considerations on this project,” he explained. “Further, uniform frequency coverage throughout the space and suitable sound pressure levels were equally important. The DAS Aero-20A loudspeakers are not only musical, their horizontal dispersion characteristics do a great job of providing even coverage throughout the space. Equally important, these loudspeakers don’t interfere with line-of-sight considerations, and this was particularly important because there are left, center, and right LED screens mounted above the stage area. DAS Audio’s DASnet audio management software took care of the networking and monitoring of all components in the system.”
Ishmael was also impressed with DAS Audio’s customer support services. “The entire DAS team was great to work with, Ishmael said. “Every question was answered quickly, and they provided everything I needed to make this project a success—and that includes fast shipping, even during the pandemic.”
The installation at Epic Church occurred in late October 2020 and the equipment was placed into service immediately after. Since that time, Ishmael reports the new sound system has met with resounding success, “Everyone is really pleased with the new system. I’ve received numerous compliments from church management and members of the congregation have also commented on how clear and natural sounding the new system is. I believe the church will get many years of service from this sound system. It’s been a rewarding experience for everyone involved.”
