The Good Shepherd church’s new sanctuary is equipped with d&b
Drive south on I-35 from Minneapolis and, before crossing the state line between Minnesota and Iowa, you will discover the small town of Owatonna. Home of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church boasting a congregation of about eight hundred strong their new six hundred seat sanctuary has been designed and equipped by Audio Logic Systems (ALS). Jason Kartak, Senior Designer for ALS, explains, “We primarily specialize in churches, a good 75% of company business is church driven.” Kartak initialized design work a full year before construction commenced in late spring of 2008; the company’s expertise in this market was invaluable when making crucial choices about the church’s sound reinforcement system prior to construction.
Year after year the Worship Center AV Survey indicates that sound reinforcement is the single most crucial technology in a church setting. Audio Logic Systems had to choose reliable speakers. Kartak had no hesitation in selecting a d&b audiotechnik loudspeaker system: the T-Series. Several T10 line array speaker boxes with a T-SUB subwoofer are placed centrally in the sanctuary. “There are d&b E0 loudspeakers as front fills under the stage,” Kartak added, “but that is everything for the PA. No delays were necessary because the line array has a very well defined and accurate 105 degree horizontal coverage pattern and covers the entire sanctuary.”
Kartak had other reasons to be certain of his choice, “The line array was the optimal choice as the Good Shepherd sanctuary requires a little bit more of a live room feel, owing to the desire for quality traditional worship, with a choir. For the requirements we had to meet, with respect to traditional and contemporary worship, a single point source was a better choice than a center cluster with delays.” Driving the loudspeaker system are d&b’s dual channel D6 amplifiers incorporating digital signal processors to provide loudspeaker specific configurations and functions. The T-Series system was tuned entirely using the d&b amplifiers. Here again, the simple design of a single point line array allowed for fewer components, amplifiers, loudspeakers and processors, providing a higher quality sound and lower cost than a distributed system.
Due to the very individual architectural design of the sanctuary, the room required some acoustic modelling; both absorption and diffusion. ALS have been meticulous in planning the room’s design to meet Good Shepherd’s dual needs of traditional and contemporary worship. “We wanted to bring the reverb down a bit but not so as to deaden it too much,” explains Kartak. “When the choir is singing and the organ is being played there’s still some natural amplification occurring within the room.” The team from Audio Logic specified EconoWedge Diffsorber panels, placing them along the back and side walls.
Kartak reports on the congregation’s take on the new system as being more than merely positive: “They were completely floored by the difference; rating the congregational worship time as 100% better than it ever used to be.”
