Experimental surround sound setup for Arizona church
Two of Arizona-based Sun Valley Community Church’s (SVCC) five locations – the 1,300-capacity Gilbert broadcast campus and 700-seat Queen Creek centre, which opened in 2016 – recently became the initial sites for a bold new experiment in sound.
The houses of worship have adopted the Venue Flex surround sound PA system design developed by AV systems provider WAVE, but taken the technology one step further by being the first venues anywhere to integrate KLANG:technologies’ KLANG:fabrik 3D IEM audio mixing system with an immersive PA design, bringing the church’s live band into a truly surround sound environment.
Using custom DSP algorithms, WAVE’s custom Venue Flex system is designed to give the FOH engineer the ability to create a livelier, more authentic-sounding sonic environment by directing delayed and processed signals to surround speakers, simulating reflections off the walls of the space. For music, the benefit is a more natural-sounding room while keeping that environment acoustically optimised for high-impact worship and spoken word that require a more controlled acoustical environment for intelligibility.
The KLANG:fabrik is a perfect fit for that application, says Armando Fullwood, executive director at WAVE’s main office in Harrisburg, North Carolina: “The way our Venue Flex system works fits extremely well with how KLANG works,” he said. “Both systems are intended to make the environment in which music is performed and heard as natural as possible, as through there wasn’t a sound system between the performers and the audience. When KLANG came out, we immediately saw how it would fit in with the Venue Flex methodology.”
Fullwood and his team first saw and heard KLANG:fabrik at NAMM 2016. That was a few months before Mike Ward, the audio director at SVCC, encountered them at the InfoComm Show in Las Vegas.
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