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Danley Loudspeakers Chosen Over Line Arrays at New Birth South Metropolitan Church

New Birth South Metropolitan Church (NBS) in Jonesboro, Georgia, is a close affiliate of nearby New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the top ten mega-churches in the country. Although small in comparison to its mother church, the sanctuary of NBS is immense by any other measure. It seats 3,000 in an area 140-feet deep by 300-feet wide.

Regardless of ceiling height, conveying smooth, intelligible sound to all those seats would be challenge enough, but the challenge was compounded by remarkably low 26-foot ceilings. The AV project had been awarded to Creative Media Solutions - whose strength lies in the "V" of "AV." John Hogg was the

project manager for CMS, and realizing how challenging the project was he called on regional audio powerhouse dB Audio and Video for assistance. The original design had called for line array product, but upon hearing a Danley Sound Labs SH-50 LCR loudspeaker installation, New Birth South's technical director, David Patrick, recognized that a line array was completely inappropriate for the situation. He instead chose the Danley solution that has delivered wonderful, loud and clear music and voice through an LCR Danley loudspeaker system amply supported all the way down to 25Hz by twelve Danley subwoofers!

NBS wanted a sound system that would serve two crucial functions. First, it had to pump high-energy gospel music with enough power to lift people from their seats, almost literally! Second, it had to convey Pastor Andre Landers' spellbinding sermons with nuance and clarity. Given a room the size of a football field with a fairly low ceiling, making good on either requirement, let alone both, would stretch the limits of any system composed of conventional loudspeakers.

"I was astounded to learn that they had been considering doing a line array in this room," stated Stanford. "It's a perfect example of how the industry has thoughtlessly fallen head over heels for line arrays. In this case, you have a huge reflective back wall. A line array would hit that at essentially zero-degrees and bounce back to the pastor 300 ms later. The coverage in such a wide room would be terrible. We have to turn the tide on the mindset that line arrays are the solution to everything - they're not!"

The overall loudspeaker system design utilized distributed LCR for precise imaging of music and voice with ample distributed delays for even coverage. Each of the main loudspeaker blocks is composed of two Danley SH-50s, which rely on Danley's patented Synergy Horn technology to convey phase-coherent audio with remarkably well-defined pattern control. Additional SH-50s compose the delay ring located eighty feet into the room. These delays were angled such that there are no reflections against the back wall, an accomplishment only possible with Danley's tight pattern control.

Original architectural design called for the subwoofers to be placed under the stage. But having heard what incredible performance Danley Tapped Horn technology could deliver, Patrick eagerly accepted Danley's recommendation of placing four Danley TH-115s and eight Danley TH-215s, together with the loudspeakers, in the distributed system. Given the tremendous efficiency of Danley's Tapped Horn subwoofer technology, the twelve units combine to generate an undeniable low-end experience for NBS!

An Innovason Sy80 digital console feeds a sophisticated Peavey Neon DSP that in turn delivers 48 outputs with appropriate timing and minimal filtering and EQ. A relatively modest 24 Danley amplifiers power all the speakers, a feat not possible with conventional loudspeakers, given their inefficiencies. "To get anything even approaching this kind of response with a conventional loudspeaker would require bi and probably tri-amplification," remarked Patrick. "That doubles or triples the amps, and it doubles or

triples the processing cost. Since the Danley's only require one amp channel per box, it was a big cost savings for the church. And in this new world of green initiatives, we also help keep the short term and long term power requirements down."

NBS is very happy with the sound of their new church. "This is my first experience mixing on a cross matrix LCR and I love it," Patrick further commented. "For music, I'll typically leave the lead vocals in the center, along with certain instruments such as the kick drum, snare and bass guitar, and get a very spatial sound by sending the choir, praise team and other instruments panned spatially to the left and right only. The separation within the stereo field is awesome. It really helps to bring out the clarity. Spoken word is perfectly articulate, and the bass is amazing! This designed system really helps us to deal with a room as live and reverberant as ours. The Danley speakers are very impressive as far as their SPL output and performance with so little amp power."

In picture: New Birth South Metropolitan Church, a close affiliate of nearby New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, installed a new sound system that included Danley SH-50 and SH-100, and SH-46 full-range loudspeakers, along with Danley TH-115 and TH-215 subwoofers.

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Danley Loudspeakers Chosen Over Line Arrays at New Birth South Metropolitan Church

3rd November 2008

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