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First Baptist Church
Nevada, Missouri
This congregation moved to their
new facilities in 1996. It is a spacious, 600 seat facility with a
colonial, traditional feel. The 12 rank Moller pipe organ speaks
very well in this space. The architect knew how to design a space for the traditional
style of worship. The church now has two worship
assemblies. One has traditional music - piano. organ. and choir. One
has contemporary music - four piece band, vocal team and a worship leader.
The original sound system, built with the
new building had served adequately in the beginning, but was aging, failing and
did not have the facilities to accommodate the contemporary worship style. A
couple of the newer components that had been added by local music stores were
reused, but reassigned in the new system. One AV contractor had "slapped"
some new speakers in the overhead soffit and called it good, but abandoned
the church after the check was deposited.
Our first project in the soffit
was to remove all the previous speakers. There were five speakers (3
large, 2 small) left behind from the original system, but not in use and the two
enclosures from the "upgrade." The new array consists of
two dual woofer enclosures and five compression drivers mounted to 2"
throat bi-radial horns.
We reused the 12" JBL 2226H woofers from the
"new" speaker because they were very useful for the new design.
We had custom boxes build to orient the woofer in a vertical arrangement to aid
the directivity in the low mid frequency range. New compression drivers
and horns were added to provide coverage to the entire seating area.
The other major change in the system
was the expansion of the stage monitoring system. Two monitor systems were
in place previously, but one of them was intermittent with hums and
buzzes. This was due to failing electronics. The system now features five monitor systems
(1-worship leader, 2-vocals, 3-guitars, 4-bass/drums, 5-choir.)
A special on stage mixer for the keyboardist allows her to
create a custom mix for herself with the Aviom 16 channel personal mixer. She
can choose any of the other five monitor mixes or combine individual signals from the
keyboard, bass, guitar and worship leader. The Aviom line
level output feeds to a custom built powered floor monitor (the big box beside
the keyboard.)
Four Hot Spot monitors on microphone stands provide vocal
monitoring for the choir (they needed to hear the song leader and preacher.)
The building has a 1.25" conduit for
audio lines buried beneath the slab, from the booth to the stage. It is
completely full with wires and yet more
were needed. The church didn't want to trench the floor, add more conduits and
patch the floor, so we had to find another solution. One CAT5 cable
was already in the conduit (for previous video work) and would not be needed
with the new video system. We choose to use an Aviom analogue to digital
converter to transform the console outputs to digital route them over the CAT5
cable into the amplifier rack where a digital to analogue converter provided
signals for the digital system processors. This same system is what feeds
the on stage 16 channel mixer for the keyboard musician. It works better
than we could have hoped. The four lines previously used to take
signals to the amplifier rack were reused for new microphone lines on stage.
The existing control booth was cleaned
reorganized and reused. The old console was large for a 24 channel
mixer. The new 32 channel console is small for it size.
The video
projection system was also updated. The old projector was reassigned to serve as
a confidence monitor for the participants on stage. The projector is
mounted on a post at the front of the control booth and aimed at the rear
wall. The new main projector is mounted above the center rear exit door
with a telephoto lens.
This new system was built by
volunteers in the congregation with direction from Tim Scott the maintenance
supervisor and Jordan Audio Consultants.
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