Peak City Church in Colorado Springs, CO, is a dynamic, contemporary Christian house of worship experiencing a high level of growth. The church recently moved to a new location with room to expand its congregation, services, and community outreach and looked to LEA Professional to provide amplification solutions to serve this growing community.
[The Integration Guide to Houses of Worship]
Peak City Church currently serves about 800 parishioners with a range of services, support groups, and classroom-based instruction for children and adults. As part of the church's plans to best address its current and future needs, managers reached out to AV systems integrator, Sight+Sound Technologies (SST) to design and install sound, lighting, and video systems that included a new distributed audio system for their lobby/cafe and common-space hallway area, and systems for their multi-use classrooms.
Kris Johnson, COO at SST, was one of the key project point people for the new Peak City church sound system expansion. Johnson explained that Peak City Church wanted to provide intelligible, pleasing, clear, and flexible audio support for its auxiliary spaces and classrooms. The common areas often carry the audio of services or other programs happening in the main auditorium, but they may also have background music, announcements, or their own audio as needed. The three multi-purpose classroom systems are primarily independent and are used to support group-specific programs or video support.
[How Audio Helps Houses of Worship Regather with Confidence]
"We put in place five LEA Connect Series 704D, four-channel amplifiers—two supporting the distributed audio and three more amps, one in each of the classrooms. We did their whole distributed audio through the lobby and in the hallways with the LEA amps," said Johnson. "All their sound systems are now on the same Dante network so that we can distribute the sound anywhere we want, which is a very nice growth feature for the church."
"The 704D is one of our favorite amps; we keep a couple of them on the shelf because they always come up as a great fit for projects," added Johnson. "The wattage and features of the 704D are a good fit for the variety of different speaker systems we use. We've hooked LEA amps up with Martin Audio, EAW, BOSE, and other speaker brands, and we always get great-sounding results."
The Peak City Church distributed system is making full use of the DSP features of the 704D amps. With a built-in, 32-bit, 96kHz core DSP architecture, the Connect Series offers high-quality Routable Input Matrix, Crossovers, Parametric EQ, Output Delay, Limiting, and more. Johnson appreciates how the built-in DSP saves valuable rack space, weight, and system costs, as well as saves installation time. In addition, he has been impressed with the amp’s ability to connect through the LEA Cloud platform for remote service and support.
“It's really refreshing to have a single-rack-space amp that has good power, and a lot of network features behind it, and all at a great price—other single-rack-space amp brands are just not very economical for us for most applications,” added Johnson. “LEA amps are feature-rich, rugged, and affordable; that's what we love about it. We have a hotel project coming up, and we will most likely specify several LEA amps; I'm looking forward to working on that project and working more with LEA Professional.”
