More than a century old, and nearly a decade since its last major update, The First United Methodist Church (FUMC) in Prattville, Alabama, spent the past year renovating its sanctuary – cleaning, refurbishing and restoring technical systems to meet the needs of its 1,000-plus assembly and provide for a wider range of service presentations and performances.

Key to the upgrade is a Renkus-Heinz audio system deliveing clarity in live performance as well as intelligibility of the spoken word.

‘Our church is a beautiful but very old building, and with plaster walls and other obstacles, it’s difficult to install new technologies in a space that wasn’t built for it, so we took the approach of doing several things at once,’ says Director of Music Ministries, Jeremy Pyles. ‘We have a thriving music programme involving people of all ages, and after years of dealing with less-than-perfect sound, we took this opportunity to upgrade our sanctuary’s audio system to something we can be proud of.’

For the audio system design and installation, FUMC called on JM Anderson at Auburn AV, the area’s leading audio, video and lighting provider. Anderson says that the church had previously used a combination of loud speakers dating from the 1970s to the ’90s, and ranging in size and performance.

‘Acoustically, the sanctuary is very reverberant,’ he says. ‘It has stained glass windows, hard walls, floors and sloped ceilings. Our main goal was to use a digitally-steerable sound system to point the sound down at the congregation and away from all of the reflective surfaces.

‘The ICLive X system was a perfect fit for this project. It delivers excellent, controllable audio with great coverage from a small footprint. It sounds great and looks great – both aspects that are very important here.’

ICLive X comprises three freely combinable, steerable-array modules and a subwoofer. The system’s Acoustic Source Multiplier (ASM) waveguide allows the HF section to coaxially mount in front of the LF section. The coaxial driver arrangement delivers a consistent and symmetrical dispersion of both high frequencies and low frequencies along the entire length of the array, providing the freedom to choose any acoustic centre.

The Auburn AV team made use of the Loudspeaker Recommendation services offered by Renkus-Heinz. As a part of this service, the local manufacturer’s representative Richard Hembree brought many years’ experience with digitally-steerable arrays to the project.

‘In addition to the need to avoid reflective surfaces such as the large balcony face and tall plaster walls, this sanctuary has three distinct audience areas – a high balcony, a deep and low under balcony, and the wide near-field area between the platform and the balcony,’ Hembree says. ‘The IC-Live X system allows the reinforced sound to focus as needed to evenly cover the congregation with a high level of intelligibility and full-range sound.’

Working with Hembree, to finalise the specifications, Anderson and the Auburn AV team installed LR arrays, each of an ICLive LX, ICLive X and ICLive XL. The resulting 9.5-inch wide by 100-inch-tall array is capable of pattern control below 200Hz. A pair of Renkus-Heinz dual 12-inch PNX212 subwoofers were tucked under the platform behind grille cloth to round out the low end.

‘We ended up with a high-intelligibility sound system with minimal interaction between the reinforced audio and the room. The room can remain live and rich for the organ and choir, yet at the same time have very high speech intelligibility. With the ICLive X, we can steer the sound where we want it,’ Anderson reports. ‘For our company, Renkus-Heinz has become the go-to system for difficult spaces like this.’