When Northside Baptist Church needed to source a sound system for its newly constructed worship space, the church’s technical team found itself confronted with familiar challenges. Like so many houses of worship, the church leadership needed to ensure the best possible sound coverage within their new sanctuary’s acoustic environment while balancing its love for music in worship with clarity of speech.
Crucially, all this needed to be achieved without taking too much from the donation plate. Now the church has found the perfect solution in the elegant but powerful shape of TW AUDiO ELLA.
Marking the first ELLA installation in the United States, the system has been greeted by Bob Slie, Youth Pastor at Northside Baptist Church, as having transformed the church’s worship experience.
Slie first experienced ELLA as part of an early demonstration of the technology at the WFX Show in Orlando. At the time, the church leadership had become frustrated by their search for a sound system – providers had either suggested very expensive options or cheap proposals that Slie and his colleagues knew would prove inadequate.
But on hearing a demonstration of just four extremely compact ELLA6 boxes accompanied by a single S32 cardioid subwoofer, Slie immediately sought out the TW AUDiO team to discuss the church’s needs.
Offering a truly ground-breaking alternative to traditional installed sound options, ELLA combines the slim form factor of a column with the flexibility of a line array plus built-in passive cardioid technology. Each ELLA6 unit combines a custom-designed waveguide with five 1″ dome tweeters to reproduce smooth and precise high frequencies up to 20 kHz, matched with a custom designed high performance 6.5″ driver.
Now completed, Northside Baptist Church boasts 22 ELLA6 elements supported by six VERA S32i. These are configured in two hangs of eight ELLA6 as the main left and right arrays with a further hang of two ELLA6 as the center-fill plus two further arrays of ELLA6 to provide left and right out-fill. Low end support is courtesy of a central cluster of three pairs of VERA S32i, while power is delivered by five Powersoft Quattrocanali 8804 Dante + DSP amplifiers using the dedicated TW AUDiO presets.
“ELLA is the ideal solution for the space,” reflected TW AUDiO’s Mick Whelan. “The system performance has to be heard to be believed – the coverage is completely uniform throughout the listening area with zero phasing anomalies as you move left to right or front to back.
“Also, the passive cardioid topology of the ELLA6 and cardioid design of the subwoofer cluster delivers a very quiet stage area, so much so that the musicians had to adapt to their new environment! They were used to hearing so much sound spillover onto the stage that it was a new experience for them to have a properly controlled space. Of course that’s a joy for any monitor or front of house engineer working with lots of open mics.”
The installation was supported by local AV systems integrator Arrendell Media, whose owner Brian Arrendell ensured the project was delivered seamlessly.
“We really are very proud to have brought ELLA to the United States with such an impressive project,” continued Whelan. “Northside Baptist Church needs to be heard to be appreciated, it’s a wonderful space.”
Having finally found the solution he spent so long searching for, Bob Slie agreed: “In 21 years with this church I’ve never heard our music sound like this,” he enthused.
