Organised to help participants gain an appreciation of religious differences and promote greater understanding, the two-day The Time Is Now Prophecy Conference 2018 at the Greater Tacoma Convention Center featured renowned speakers on biblical prophecy. A clear sound system was crucial to its success and, to ensure the highest intelligibilty for conference participants, the Essential Audio Group looked to WorxAudio and PreSonus.

With offices in Seattle, WA and Nashville, the Essential Audio Group serves touring, concert and corporate events, with President and CEO John N Wilson overseeing system design, event management and sales.

‘This conference had approximately 2,000 participants,’ Wilson explains. ‘The room is quite large. The seating area measures roughly 180ft wide by 130ft deep. This very wide seating arrangement presented a challenge in that even coverage and vocal intelligibility at every seat was critical to the success of the event. To address this, we flew 14 PreSonus WorxAudio XL1T-P line arrays for the house mains – with each of the left and right seven-element clusters flown at a height of 22ft. For low frequency support, we used two WorxAudio TL218SS super subs, with one enclosure each on the left and right sides of the stage.’

To augment the primary set-up, Wilson and his crew positioned an additional two WorxAudio XL1T-P enclosures downstage left and right on the stage lip. These two loudspeakers handled front fill chores – giving added clarity for the first six-to-eight rows of front and center seating. Out fill responsibilities were handled by a combination of two PreSonus ULT15 point source loudspeakers (one each for left and right), and two PreSonus StudioLive 312AI point source loudspeakers (one each left and right).

‘The WorxAudio XL1 has an unusually wide 160° horizontal coverage pattern,’ Wilson says. ‘This made the XL1 our first choice for this application due to the extended width of the room’s seating area. The ULT15s are the perfect complement to the XL1 for out fill, as they have the same voicing as the XL1 and helped cover the outer seats perfectly. Because of this implementation, coverage was consistent in both volume and tonality at every seat in the room.

‘Equally important, these loudspeakers have first-class speech intelligibility characteristics,’ Wilson added. ‘As the system was primarily used for speech reproduction, this aspect of their sound reproduction capabilities was crucial. This combination of loudspeakers also comfortably handled several short sets of contemporary praise and worship music featuring a small band’

For companies such as the Essential Audio Group, the ability to reach out to the equipment manufacturer and receive answers to questions in timely fashion is crucial. In this regard, Wilson was very complimentary of the PreSonus Commercial Division’s customer and technical support services.

‘Having the expertise of the manufacturer’s representatives at our disposal is incredibly helpful,’ Wilson reports. ‘Jon Taylor, who handles Technical Sales for PreSonus’ Commercial Division, provided us with a system design specifically for this application. We couldn’t be happier with the service we receive from the company.

‘Our customer was extremely pleased. Several of the customer’s production crew members who had done this event in the same room in the past said they had never heard it sound better. Everyone was very impressed with the intelligibility of the system and its ability to evenly and accurately reproduce the program material. Even with just two TL2188SS subwoofers, we had more than enough low frequency power to cover the entire room with rumbling earthquake sound effects from one of the presenters’ videos. The entire project worked out really well.’