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KingsGate Church Bonds with UK Worship Community through a Meyer Sound System
A pleasant hour's drive north of London, the city of Peterborough is home to KingsGate Community Church, which recently completed a 70,000-square-foot building featuring a 1,200-seat auditorium. With its flexible seating arrangement, the auditorium hosts everything from regular services with praise bands to community functions and educational seminars. Regardless of the program, a powerful and versatile Meyer Sound M2D line array loudspeaker system is on hand to adequately deliver the messages being conveyed. "When KingsGate started planning for the new building in May 2000, its media director Pete Charlton set out an overriding principle—striving for excellence in every aspect of the new church: the building, the technical facilities and the ministry," explains Brian Hillson, managing director of Peterborough-based B&H Sound Services. The architect for the project was Tony Byrne. The rigorous planning process for KingsGate's new facility included dispatching a working party to visit the top worship facilities in America and Australia to study the design and installation of their lighting and audiovisual systems. This was the start of a long journey, which eventually led to the world-class technical infrastructure at KingsGate. Designed with Meyer Sound's MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program, KingsGate's audio system features left and right arrays of four M2D line array loudspeakers, each topped with a single M2D-Sub subwoofer, and complemented with a center-flown UPA-1P loudspeaker. Two UPJ-1P VariO loudspeakers and four UPM-1P loudspeakers are built into the front of the stage for coverage in the first rows, and 700-HP subwoofers mounted to the left and right of the stage provide low-frequency coverage. Pete Charlton says the M2D array is more than up to the task: "The M2D system was without question a great choice," he observes. "It does a great job with the music, and at the same time it delivers the intelligibility we require to get the word across. The system's versatility is quite important, as the auditorium also gets used by local schools and organizations for a wide range of events, from musicals and plays to seminars." A single Galileo loudspeaker management system is in place to handle zoning of the loudspeaker system. As Charlton explains, the Galileo system will offer even greater flexibility as the church grows. "Presently the Galileo does a great job helping us to see what's going on, but we've clearly only begun to tap into its full potential," he notes. "As we expand and add more M2D boxes, we'll certainly be making more use of its tremendous capabilities." Hillson, who played a key role in the installation since the start, comments that the support from Meyer Sound was integral to its success. "We have worked with Meyer Sound for many years in our hire operation," Hillson says, "and were already convinced that the client specification would be best met by the Meyer Sound line array range. But what convinced the client to follow our advice was the continued interest and customer support throughout the project from Meyer's staff, as well as the flow of reports from other churches in the States relying on Meyer to reproduce praise music and deliver the spoken word. A church falls at the first hurdle if its congregation cannot hear the Gospel." November, 2008 |
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