- JONESBORO, GA—New Birth South Metropolitan Church (NBS) in Jonesboro, GA, is a close affiliate of nearby New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the top-ten mega churches in the country. It seats 3,000 in an area 140 feet deep by 300 feet wide. Regardless of ceiling height, conveying smooth, intelligible sound to all those seats would be challenge enough, but the prospect was compounded by remarkably low 26-foot ceilings.
New Birth South Metropolitan Church, a close affiliate of nearby New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, installed a new sound system that included Danley SH-50 and SH-100, and SH-46 full-range loudspeakers, along with Danley TH-115 and TH-215 subwoofers.
The AV project had been awarded to Custom Media Services. John Hogg was the project manager for CMS, and he called on dB Audio and Video for assistance
The original design had called for line array product, but upon hearing a Danley Sound Labs SH-50 LCR loudspeaker installation, New Birth South’s technical director, David Patrick, recognized that a line array was completely inappropriate for the situation. He instead chose the Danley solution that has delivered loud and clear music and voice through an LCR Danley loudspeaker system amply supported all the way down to 25Hz by 12 Danley subwoofers.
NBS wanted a sound system that would serve two crucial functions. First, it had to pump high-energy gospel music with enough power to lift people from their seats. Second, it had to convey Pastor Andre Landers’ spellbinding sermons with nuance and clarity. Given a room the size of a football field with a fairly low ceiling, making good on either requirement, let alone both, would stretch the limits of any system composed of conventional loudspeakers.
The overall loudspeaker system design utilized distributed LCR for precise imaging of music and voice with ample distributed delays for even coverage. Each of the main loudspeaker blocks is composed of two Danley SH-50s, which rely on Danley’s patented Synergy Horn technology to convey phase-coherent audio with remarkably well-defined pattern control. Additional SH-50s compose the delay ring located 80 feet into the room. These delays were angled such that there are no reflections against the back wall, an accomplishment aided by Danley’s tight pattern control.
This Danley setup was chosen over more traditional line arrays. Original architectural design called for the subwoofers to be placed under the stage. But having heard what incredible performance Danley Tapped Horn technology could deliver, Patrick eagerly accepted Danley’s recommendation of placing four Danley TH- 115s and eight Danley TH-215s, together with the loudspeakers, in the distributed system. Given the tremendous efficiency of Danley’s Tapped Horn subwoofer technology, the 12 units combine to generate an undeniable low-end experience for NBS.An Innovason Sy80 digital console feeds a Peavey NION DSP that in turn delivers 48 outputs with appropriate timing and minimal filtering and EQ. A relatively modest 24 Danley amplifiers power all the speakers. “To get anything even approaching this kind of response with a conventional loudspeaker would require biand probably tri-amplification,” remarked Patrick. “That doubles or triples the amps, and it doubles or triples the processing cost. Since th Danleys only require one amp channel per box, it was a big cost savings for the church. And in this new world of green initiatives, we also help keep the short term and long term power requirements down.”
