- Great Falls, MT--Non-denominational Harvest Springs Community Church is a significant force throughout the Great Falls community, offering a wide range of programs and services for children, teens and young adults. The church’s popularity is due in no small part to pastor Cory Engel’s worship style, featuring up-tempo, modern Christian music during the church’s three weekend worship services.
- HSCC’s steadily growing congregation eventually led to the need for a larger facility, though the move was not without its share of challenges. The newly acquired 30 year old building, originally built for a more traditional church organ and choir, presented tremendous reverberation issues for HSCC’s amplified music production.
- Rod Chaon of Rod’s Music & Sound, a local supplier of audio equipment and musical instruments, completed the primary design work for HSCC’s new system. Chaon recommended a ceiling-mounted cluster of three Mackie HDA High Definition Arrayable Powered Loudspeakers with two Mackie sub-woofers directly below the cluster.
- “Rod walked through the facility and recommended the Mackie high definition arrays,” said Pastor Engel. “He worked directly with Mackie, using EAW Resolution software to determine where and how high the arrays needed to be mounted and how many speakers were needed to get superior room coverage.”
- Audio engineer Matt Johnson of Fourth Avenue Studios, also in Great Falls, consulted with Chaon and Pastor Engel on the final system design. According to Johnson, musicality and speech intelligibility were both crucial aspects of the selection process.
- “The need for both focused vocal intelligibility and full-range musical performance meant we had to consider a system that was versatile enough to handle both tasks,” he said. “In addition, aesthetics was also a concern. They had spent a considerable amount of time and money on an extensive remodeling of the sanctuary, and wanted a system that would work well with the new décor.”
- As Johnson observes, the HDA system's low profile design blends with the church’s ceiling, and their scalability, combined with the two-way, 1200 watt output from each loudspeaker makes HDA a versatile solution for all of HSCC’s audio applications. “The output and sound quality from the HDA system surpassed my expectations,” he added.
- According to Pastor Engel, “The Mackie HDAs puts out a vocal quality that is comparable to anything I’ve heard in a live setting. We’re extremely impressed with the results.”
Community Church Goes Hi-Def with Mackie
