Houston church installs Electro-Voice system

12 August 2009

USA - NLFX Professional recently installed an extensive Electro-Voice sound system at Creekside Christian Fellowship, a church located southeast of Houston, Texas. With the help of EV's IRIS-Net remote-control and supervision software, NLFX continues to monitor the performance of Creekside's new system from its offices nearly 1,500 miles away in Bemidji, Minn.

NLFX's Travis Scharn described the project: "Creekside is really in the first of three stages of completion. At this point the main, 450-seat worship space acts as a large, multi-purpose room, and will remain in use while they complete an adjacent, much larger permanent sanctuary. Anything and everything takes place in the current space, in addition to housing their Sunday services. It doubles as their youth facility, a venue for trade shows and concerts, and even as a site for volleyball practices. We were referred to Creekside by a Houston-area building contractor, and began the project with a few conference calls to determine exactly what kind of sound system they needed to address such a multi-purpose space."

NLFX arrived at a system design including FRi+ main loudspeakers in two clusters of three boxes - two full-range boxes flanking two FRi+181S low-range boxes. "Basically a 60-degree planar array with a biamp operation on the tops and mono subs," says Scharn, "powered by TG5 amplifiers with onboard DSP/control modules. Creekside's prior system consisted of powered speakers on sticks, so the prospect of a networked, professional-quality EV audio system was enthusiastically received by the church's staff, some of whom had heard FRi+ boxes at another local church. Plus the whole package came at a surprisingly competitive price, in relation to what it can do, and, as we consistently hear with all the EV gear we use, it sounded great right out of the box - we barely needed to make any adjustments."

NLFX also installed a Midas Venice console at FOH, five EV SxA250 powered stage monitors, EV RE-2 systems for all wireless mic applications, with RE410 handhelds and a beige RE97Tx headworn mic for the pastor, an array of hardwired EV mics including RE410s for vocals, Cardinals, and Ravens for instruments, along with Klark Teknik DI boxes.

"The use of TG amps loaded with RCM-26 modules and a UCC1 Can-bus converter allows NLFX engineers to control the entire sound system via IRIS-Net from our headquarters in Minnesota," Scharn adds. "Creekside's AV team can fine-tune on-site in IRIS-Net as well, having access to certain layers to ensure that the system runs smoothly."

(Jim Evans)