A case in point was a recent install for the Mountaintop Community Church in Birmingham, Alabama, part of the Willow Creek Association. "Their type of worship is very contemporary, a high-volume, very high-energy style of service," McMillan says. "You need a certain level of quality to pull that off, so their existing point and shoot system needed to be replaced."
The challenge, McMillan says, was that the budget was "relatively small to support that style of service in a room that seats 1700 people." The solution was to base the new system around Electro-Voice EVA-2082S full-range dual element line array modules, in 120 (H) x 60 (V) and 120 x 20 dispersion configurations. "We've used EVA systems many times," McMillan says, "and given the very high-quality sound and the amount of coverage you get for the money, it's just a no-brainer. We feel that there is nothing in that price range that even comes close."
McMillan adds that "the clarity of the EVAs, even before we tune the system, is phenomenal. We've used other brands whose boxes cost nearly double but still need to be tweaked for a couple of hours to make them sound good. But with EVAs you're not wasting time trying to make the box sound good. You're only tuning to align the phase with the rest of the system and to deal with reflections in that particular acoustical environment."
(Jim Evans)