Home   |    About Us   |    Projects   |    Services   |    Contact   |    Links   |    Articles    |    JSBP

"Helping You Sound Your Best"

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 -  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 loaded with 600 watt cones, and five 100 watt 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.

Two new sub woofer systems were added. Each enclosure houses an 800 watt high compliance woofer in a tuned enclosure voiced to produce extreme bass with just the right amount of punch.  These enclosures are placed on the main floor.

The sub woofers and the overhead woofer enclosures were designed and built by Concert Systems LLC of Southbend Indiana.  Concert Systems has been building proprietary speaker enclosures since the mid 70's.

The amplifiers are all Crown products and so the numbers are very conservative. The sub woofers have 2000 watts available.  The overhead woofers have 1200 watt available while the five high frequency horns share 300 watts.

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 four monitor systems mixed from the console. Each monitor system has 200 watts of amplifier power available to power the wedges,

To complement the colonial style of the sanctuary, custom floor wedges were built and painted to match the décor. Each wedge has a 12" 300 watt woofer with a concentric 1" throat 80 watt compression driver and an internal 400 watt capacity passive crossover.  The dispersion of the high frequencies is a smooth 75 degree conical patter that helps to "cut through" the acoustic blur.

A group of special Aviom brand on stage mixers allows several musicians  to create a custom mix for themselves. They can choose any of the other four monitor mixes or combine individual signals from the keyboard, bass,  guitar and worship leader. These unique mixes are monitor through headphones or ear bud monitors.   

For the keyboard player the Aviom line level output feeds to a custom built powered floor monitor (the big box beside the keyboard.)  It includes a 400 watt 15" woofer and an 80 watt 1" throat compression driver on a 60x40 degree horn and a 400 watt capacity passive crossover.

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 but is extremely versatile. External compressors and effects units have been added to enhance the mixing of music and to help control speech.

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 is a shop photo of the type of sub woofer installed at FBC Nevada.

The woofer has not yet been installed.  These subs are tuned to reproduce

from 35-120 Hz.