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Danley Loudspeakers Takes Northbrook United Methodist from Traditional to Blended Worship Styles

While in the process of shifting from a more traditional style to a more blended style of worship, the people of Northbrook United Methodist Church began to notice that their audio system wasn't capable of handling the change. Although parishioners had consistently complained that they had difficulty understanding the sermons, the inclusion of more contemporary music made the old system's poor fidelity and weak bass response glaringly obvious.

The growing problems moved the church to enlist the help of Ronnie Stanford,

systems advisor for the regionally renowned dB Audio and Video, Gainesville, Georgia, a company that provides installations for schools, government agencies, and businesses, in addition to their bread & butter and passion - churches.

Northbrook seats 700 in a large, rectangular room with sixty-foot ceilings. The front of the balcony is seventy feet from the front wall, and the balcony itself is another fifty feet deep. The seating is arrayed in a semicircle focused on the stage. "From an audio perspective, you have to keep your speakers in front of the pulpit, and yet you need to cover a lot of seats that are actually behind the pulpit," explained Stanford. "In addition, part of the seating is underneath 'wings' that are twelve feet from either side of the pulpit. Under the wings, the ceilings are a mere eight feet. So your main speakers are hanging off of sixty-foot ceilings, and yet you still have to reach underneath these wings!"

Stanford brought a pair of Danley Sound Labs SH-50s full-range speakers and a single Danley TH-115 subwoofer for a demo. "We weren't trying to pin anyone against the back wall with bass," he joked, "but we did want a nice, rich low-end response. We flew the three SH-50 speakers above the pulpit with an additional SH-100 as downfill. Now the church heard the sound they wanted to hear with the Danley speakers. The nice, high ceilings eliminated the need for other downfills."

With the help of their dB Audio and Video engineer Ivan Beaver, Stanford tackled the wings with a pair of Atlas SM82 full-range wall-mount speakers. "We placed the Atlases at the crown of the wall and ran them on delays," he explained. "We had to be careful not to create problems in the main seating area. By making sure they were properly timed and then we kept the volume low."

Stanford rounded out Northbrook's audio makeover with acoustic treatment against the long, flat back wall. Noted Stanford, "I just knew with the long throw from that height that we were going to energize that back wall in a way that the older sound system was incapable of doing. So, without adding some acoustical treatment, the reflections would have been harsh." Outside of the back wall, however, no other acoustical treatments were necessary, owing to the tight pattern control of the Danley speakers.

Additional improvements were simple, but well appreciated. dB Audio and Video added a 16-channel Yamaha AW16G digital recorder so that they could preserve and reproduce what were quickly becoming very spirited and technically proficient performances by their growing cast of musicians. An Eiki LC-XT3 video projector was added to allow a long, seventy-foot projection against a newly-installed ascender screen. "It's simple, but impressive," said Stanford. "We're shooting bright, clean video seventy feet against a screen that rises from the floor behind the choir. We couldn't hang the screen because we didn't want to obscure a beautiful stained glass

window near the ceiling."

dB Audio and Video completed the project in October 2006. "Our performance

guarantee is plus or minus 3dB across the whole listening area. If we weren't using the Danleys, that would have been a problem. Add in the quiet, but effective, delayed system under the side wings and we met our goal without a problem. The church is extremely pleased!"

Already recognized as an industry leader in innovative loudspeaker designs, Danley is known for his restless curiosity and knack for devising novel solutions to problems that the rest of the industry put to rest as insoluble long ago. While Danley has participated in a ground-zero bombing simulation, a jet engine active noise cancellation project, and the creation of a sonic-boom generator, his first and lasting love is the faithful reproduction and reinforcement of sound for studios, high-end home theaters, houses of worship, and live music venues of all sizes.

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Danley Loudspeakers Takes Northbrook United Methodist from Traditional to Blended Worship Styles

30th January 2007

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