Music ministry represents a significant portion of Resurrection Life's overall mission focus and the church's attention to audio performance and production overall truly reflects that. To illustrate, worship services typically will feature up to a dozen ensemble singers on stage backed by a full praise band of eight musicians, eight-piece horn section and 200-voice choir.
With this in mind, the church earmarked just over one million dollars of its construction budget for audio systems and turned to Dallas-based Acoustic Dimensions to specify a sound reinforcement system that would best represent the inspired efforts of its performers.
Spearheaded by principal consultant Craig Janssen, the Texas office of Acoustic Dimensions is widely respected for its consulting work on some of the highest-profile houses of worship, including Crystal Cathedral, Willow Creek, Fellowship Church, The Potter's House and even the Vatican's St. Peter's Square. On this particular project, senior consultant/project manager Robert Rose and Consultant Ryan Knox were charged with the task of designing a high-performance sanctuary system that would somehow fit within an extremely tight space.
Using L-Acoustics' Soundvision three-dimensional acoustical modeling software, Knox ultimately recommended a loudspeaker system that employed three arrays each comprised of five Kudo enclosures. Flown just below the catwalk, the bottom cabinet of each array neatly hangs a mere three inches above the top of a large gondola containing three giant projection screens and the stage lighting grid.
Low-frequency reinforcement for the system is supplemented by three SB218 subwoofers also flown above the gondola as well as by eight additional SB218s housed in bunkers beneath the stage.
"Kudo is one of the very few line array loudspeaker products that would actually fit in the limited space we had available," says Rose. "The fact that these enclosures can be splayed more than traditional line array cabinets while maintaining coherent summation gave us a fairly deep throw from a compact array. Plus, by using the box's adjustable vanes ('K-Louvers'), we were able to custom tailor the dispersion width to best cover the room, which is not symmetrical. We would have been hard pressed to find another loudspeaker system that would have worked quite as well."
Looking back, Rose recalls, "We were pretty excited when the Kudo first came out because we recognized that it could really open up a lot of different possibilities for us. It's a very flexible product with good output and control, and we've already specified it into several other projects based on our results with this install."
Resurrection Life technical director of audio systems Cliff Rosenberg is also impressed with the Kudo system's performance. "I think that this is the easiest PA I've ever run," he says. "I find that I don't have to do 'drastic' channel EQ on the console to have everything sound amazingly nice. In going from our old loudspeaker system in our previous sanctuary to this one, I'm finally getting all the things I never could hear before clearly out in the mix. The overall clarity is stunning and now I can very distinctly hear every single element in the band. Also, the low-end of the SB218 subs is tight and full, which helps the band's rhythm section really connect with the congregation. Operating this system feels like mixing on a giant set of studio monitors!
"Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was Kudo's affordability. I had heard a rig demoed down in Indianapolis, and then we also demoed a number of other manufacturers' line
