Nashville, TN (July 9, 2020)—Often considered to be the birthplace of Contemporary Christian Music, Nashville’s Belmont Church in the heart of Music Row recently updated its audio system, with a massive renovation of its recording studio, broadcast audio-for-video infrastructure and main sanctuary audio system. For that last item, Spectrum Sound set up the 900-seat geometrically designed sanctuary with new d&b audiotechnik A-Series augmented arrays.
“The last time Belmont Church’s main worship space sound system was renovated was nearly 20 years ago, so it was time,” states Ken DeBelius, system integration sales manager at Spectrum Sound. The geometric room layout posed significant challenges for a loudspeaker system design that would provide appropriate coverage. The main concerns of the room were the asymmetric layout of the main floor seating around the stage, along with its large, steep raked balcony, which shadowed some of the main floor, and was additionally asymmetric itself.
Sound for a Socially Distanced Ravenna Festival
It was decided that a line array solution wasn’t appropriate due to the room’s architecture and also because of sight line issues. While a working point source design was still on the drawing board, DeBelius auditioned an A-Series augmented array: “I’d actually been waiting for d&b to come up with this kind of product for a long time. Having heard it and knowing that this kind of loudspeaker product perfectly bridges the gap between point source and line array, it became an ‘Aha moment’ that this was going to be a great solution for Belmont Church.”
The resulting A-Series system is comprised of four Main flown clusters, each consisting of two ALi60 and a ALi90 cabinet for a total of 12 boxes. A pair of Yi-SUBs center flown cardioid subwoofers, two 21S under stage floor subwoofers, eight front fills, eight under balcony fills, and 10D and 30D amplifiers round out the d&b system.
d&b audiotechnik • www.dbaudio.com
