Dalton, GA (August 31, 2020)—Dalton, Georgia may be known as the carpet capitol of the world, but it’s also a deeply religious town. As a part of that, one of the six locations of growing Rock Bridge Community Church can be found in Dalton, nestled inside the historic 1,165-seat Wink Theatre. There, the congregation recently supported the installation of a new L-Acoustics A Series audio system.
The Wink Theatre location is a landmarked building that first opened in 1941 as a movie theater and was purchased by the church in 2004, two years after it began using the facility. All of the Rock Bridge Community Church locations, including the Wink Theatre, sport L-Acoustics A Series constant curvature line source sound systems installed by Steele Beaty of Skylark Audio Video, an Oklahoma City-based integrator that designed and installed the PA for all five worship spaces.
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“The A Series is a very cohesive system,” says Beaty. “The Wide boxes have a 30-degree vertical pattern, and the Focus has a 10-degree vertical pattern. Between them, we have the tools we need to fill a challenging venue like the Wink Theatre, where the balcony is 105 feet long, and the main floor is 95 feet long, but the entire venue is only 56 feet wide. It’s the very definition of a ‘shotgun’ room, and that’s why we chose to fly left and right arrays of five A15 Focus enclosures over one A15 Wide. Plus, the A15 enclosures have the Panflex adjustable waveguides that let us narrow the pattern width to 70 degrees, which also gives us a +2 dB boost in the high frequencies. So not only do we avoid getting any energy on the walls, but we accomplish it without using any DSP. A traditional line source array simply can’t do what we were able to accomplish at the Wink with the L-Acoustics A Series medium-throw line source array.”
Rock Bridge Community Church director of strategic initiatives John David Boreing adds, “The large balcony was the really difficult part. With the previous sound system, the balcony was looking at the top of the line array and didn’t get any low end from the floor-mounted subs. It was a tough room to get proper coverage for. The new A15-KS21 combo fixed that immediately.”
The Wink Theatre installation, whose design was done using Soundvision modeling software, also made use of the new M1 suite, a comprehensive set of measurement tools from L-Acoustics. “We were able to measure the performance of all of the A15 speaker systems in one venue and create a consistent contour that we applied to all of the church’s locations,” says Beaty. “We were able to make them sound as identical to each other as humanly possible.”
With the combination of A15 Wide and Focus and the flown subs, Boreing says coverage is complete, and the sound quality is excellent. “Now that the pandemic restrictions have finally been relaxed a bit on worship services, everyone is really enjoying the new sound at the Wink Theatre, which is better than ever,” he says. “Intelligibility is fantastic, and the music has a real impact, like a concert; it’s a wonderful experience.”
Rock Bridge Community Church • www.rockbridge.cc
Skylark Audio Video • www.skylarkav.com
L-Acoustics • www.l-acoustics.com
