Heritage Baptist Church Upgrades Its Martin Audio PA

Back in the year 2000, RMB Audio - one of Martin Audio's longest serving global partners - installed a Wavefront W0.5 miniature high performance speaker solution in Heritage Baptist Church in Zebulon, NC.

The splayed array was designed to provide coverage of a church seating 600 with a balcony, below a vaulted pentagonal roof. Audience seating on the floor in the sanctuary formed a 200° fan from the pulpit, which required some angle separation between the cabinet hangs to provide an overlap from the 100° horizontal pattern.
Due to Martin Audio’s advanced engineering and build quality, this gave the church an excellent return on investment. But when it came to refreshing the speakers, a cell defect was detected. Realising that components for this vintage system were no longer available, an alternative was required.

Cooper Cannady, RMB's owner, turned to the award-winning O-Line micro-line array for its accuracy and consistency, with two eight-element hangs proposed after modelling in Martin Audio's DISPLAY software, and comparing with existing room data. Suspended from the existing half-circle frame the new rig provides coverage for the floor and balcony seating to the point where the existing Martin Audio under-balcony C115 speakers are no longer required to reach the last four rows of rear seating.

Cannady always had confidence that O-Line would be the best solution. "We knew it would be spectacular for that venue," he said. "I sent them some photos of other installations we had done, and after discussing how much throw they would need they were left in no doubt as to what they were going to get. We have been able to run the system off their existing amplifiers and it went together really well, with all the angles fitting in very nicely."

Each box could be run off a single amplifier channel without applying any resolution, although RMB will add Martin Audio's dedicated DX4.0 system controller in due course - with FIR filter settings loaded in - largely for limiting and minor frequency adjustment.

"The quality has increased tremendously," noted Cooper Cannady. "Aside from its throw, we're experiencing no wall reflections, lobing or low-end thrust to the stage; it's evened out very nicely."

"This is particularly important," he said, "when three generations of families routinely attend services. The older generation have said they can hear much better—which is always the top goal we work towards. O-Line brings the spoken word up significantly."

Aside from the intelligibility and clarity of celebrants' speech, the church features worship bands, comprising piano, organ, a brass section and acoustic guitars. "When we initially demoed the system, we played music that had some pretty robust low end to it."

Finally, O-Line was always designed to be architecturally discreet, and turning to aesthetics, the RMB owner says although the PA has transferred "from black to white", the change has hardly been noticed. "In fact it looks very attractive up there."

martin-audio.com