In summer months, sun seekers and beach lovers swell the congregation at St Thomas the Apostle from 1,000 to more than 3,000 - well beyond the capacity of the New Jersey church sanctuary.

VP of Sales at ACIR Professional, Bobby Harper explains how the church came up with a creative solution: ‘It’s an older structure, and it has some history, and they didn’t want to just tear it down and build something bigger,’ he says. ‘So they opted to renovate the original building and also build an event centre, which could handle the overflow, as well as other functions.’

Connecting the church events centre to its sanctuary via audio and video was suggested early on, but a complex digital matrix with touchpanels was simply not feasible. ‘We wanted to create a solution for them that would meet their needs without getting into complex and expensive networking,’ Harper explains. In the end, a bit of creativity was all it took.

Using the seasonal population shifts to their advantage, the project was carried out in two phases: ‘The first summer, they used the (just-completed) events centre as just that – a multi-purpose events centre,’ Harper says. When autumn approached, the event centre was pressed into service as temporary sanctuary while the original 1920s-era building was then renovated, expanded, and tied in with the events centre via audio and video feeds.

Unsurprisingly, the sanctuary presented some challenging acoustics: ‘It is pretty reflective inside,’ says Harper. Replacing the carpet with granite and marble increased the reverberation, and the addition of naves to the left and right of the altar also impacted the room’s acoustics.

‘We decided to go with a distributed system,’ Harper continues. ‘We didn’t want to energise the space with a large system, and we wanted clarity and consistency in coverage.’

The room’s audio includes a pair of Community Veris 28 dual 8-inch systems left and right of the altar, with another three Veris 8 single 8-inch loudspeakers along each side. Yamaha 3500 and 5000 amplifiers power the system.

‘The church has a full praise band, with drummer, bass, keyboard, organ, a couple of violins and flute, and musicality was an important consideration,’ Harper says. ‘We had been looking into the Veris systems, and it seemed like a perfect fit.’

System drive and processing is covered by Community’s dSPEC networked loudspeaker processor. ‘The dSPEC is a great piece of gear,’ Harper enthuses. ‘We’re hardly pushing the amps - that’s the beauty of it. We use the dSPEC to calibrate the limiters on the amps for maximum efficiency with the loudspeakers. And it’s very user friendly. I plugged it in, had no training on it, and had it sorted out in less than an hour.’

The spaces to the left and right of the altar have been converted into naves, each of which is served by a pair of MX10 compact monitors as wedges. ‘We custom-painted them to match the wall, and mounted them where the wall meets ceiling,’ says Harper. ‘They look fantastic and they sound great.’

A Yamaha MG16 console is installed at the sanctuary’s mix position, with a Yamaha MG24 for the choir monitors. Sennheiser mics and wireless systems cover the choir loft, altar and musicians. A Sony PTZ70 camera captures the service and sends the signal via Ethernet to the event centre.

Over in the event centre is another Yamaha MG16 console. Connected pairs between each of the three consoles enables each to receive aux send audio feeds from the others. As Harper observes: ‘the system is not quite foolproof, but fortunately the church’s technical personnel are savvy enough not to route things into a feedback loop.’ A smaller 5.1 consumer system covers most of the room’s audio needs, and an Eiki LCWB42NA projector gets the Sony PTZ’s video feed to a ceiling-mounted DaLite screen.

The event centre was conceived from the outset as a multi-use venue, with flexibility a key requirement: ‘We installed audio I/O panels throughout the room, and they can easily configure the system for whatever event they’re holding. They can take the audio and video feed from the sanctuary, or they can host a power point demonstration, or watch a movie, or Monday night football,’ he says. ‘It also made it easy to configure a portable church while the main sanctuary was under construction.’

While A/V interconnectivity is more often the province of contemporary churches, Harper says the implementation of it in this older, more traditional setting was worth it. ‘There were certainly some challenges in terms of running cable and working out logistics, but the end result is exactly what we wanted.’

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