LUVERNE, Minn. For a church that opened about 60 years ago, the American Reformed Church has grown so much from those first days when it served just 30 families, to these days where in 2011 it built a new facility for its congregation, a state-of-the-art worship center large enough to seat about 800.
In a city located in southwest Minnesota, the current worship center was completed with the help of Twin Cities-based Audio Video Electronics. Also involved in the project were Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Architecture Inc., as the architect and Derrick Knight of Knight Acoustics as the acoustician.
With a goal of having a great sound system as part of the new worship center, AVE owner and president Stefan Svärd said, "American Reformed Church is definitely big into music. They have a progressive, contemporary worship style, but their old sanctuary had a distributed system that didn't have a lot of impact."
For American Reformed Church's volunteer technical director Arlin Sandbulte, who has worked in the role for more than 10 years, the new system with Danley Sound Labs speakers has been a "step up" from the system used in the prior space.
"It definitely provides more (impact than the previous system), I would agree with that," said Sandbulte. "The old system, for what it was, back in the day was good. I was pretty pleased with its performance, but the Danleys have improved our sound quality and have been a step up from what we had before."
Aiming for a superior sound quality for a new set of church speakers, along with providing pattern control and amp-channel-saving passive crossovers, AVE deemed a series of Danley loudspeakers, particularly the SH-60 and SH-95 models, as the right sort of fit for the new worship facility.
With that improvement in quality, Sandbulte acknowledged how that has benefited the church.
"We have had more opportunities because of it, as the increase in the quality in the system has allowed us to host more concerts and bigger names, like the band Selah and Keith and Kristyn Getty," he added.
Some of the benefits that Svärd spelled out for the Danley system arrangement at the church were great speech intelligibility, clarity, fidelity, and of great significance, being cost effective, in large part because the Danley boxes could operate solely on a single amp channel, where other units that were under consideration required either biamplification or triamplification.
The problem by imposing limitations such as needing more than one amplifier to make the system work only adds up to dollars being spent that churches would likely rather target elsewhere.
Sandbulte indicated that the church has been benefiting from that flexibility, citing that the church is using just three amplifiers running dual channel to handle the load of six speakers.
With American Reformed Church also being limited by their budget in being unable to include subwoofers, AVE found the combination of SH-60 and SH-95 speakers as a solid alternative.
"Nevertheless, the SH-60s provide respectable low end by themselves," added Svärd. Sandbulte agreed that the system does "a great job with that, for our style of worship," but added that he hoped to that at some point down the road, the budget would allow for them to add subwoofers to the system.
The church's system currently is comprised of two Danley clusters, each containing two SH-60s for primary coverage, with a SH-95 serving to handle down fill. For user control, AVE incorporated the use of a Yamaha LS9 console, with QSC processing and amplification providing support on the back end.
Regarding the the stage, Sandbulte noted that the current space includes "a much bigger stageit's a blessing and a curse. We can put more stuff up there, but we have a bunch more stuff."
Nonetheless, the stage does offer another benefit for Sandbulte, as it avoids a situation where the stage has a myriad of cables running all over, as a trough runs the length of the stage to hide the collection of cables, with paneling covering the trough, with small holes allowing the ends of the cables to appear nearest to the applicable gear.