Built by Warner Brothers in 1930 as a movie palace known as the Warner Hollywood Theatre, Times Square Church (TSC) on West 51st Street in Manhattan’s Theatre District later became the Mark Hellinger Theatre, which hosted Broadway musicals like My Fair Lady and Jesus Christ Superstar.
In 1991, the space was again repurposed, this time as an interdenominational house of worship under the direction of Pastor David Wilkerson, author of The Cross and the Switchblade. He chose to preserve the venue’s modern façade and rococo interior – now New York City landmarks – and called on Special Event Services (SES) Integration to install a new L-Acoustics K3i loudspeaker system and a DiGiCo Quantum338 mixing console.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Times Square Church closed its doors as a public worship space for 18 months, allowing church leaders to undergo a proper reassessment of its AVL facilities. For many years, TSC had employed a very touring rider-friendly audio set-up comprising an L-Acoustics V-Dosc and dV-Dosc rig paired with DiGiCo SD10 mixing consoles for both front-of-house and monitors. With the gear starting to show its age and the system’s subs in a cavity under the stage that has flooded six years earlier, rendering them unusable, the tech team was leaning on the mains also to deliver low-end reinforcement for TSC’s sizable worship team.
‘On a typical Sunday, we have a drum set, bass, multiple guitars, organ, keyboards, a full choir of 60-to-100 people, as well as up to ten singers on stage, so we have a ton going on through the PA,’ says TSC Production Director, Luke LaPrairie. ‘When considering a new loudspeaker design, we were looking to provide better coverage throughout the room. We also needed to improve frequency response accuracy. We wanted to ensure that what happened onstage would come across to the audience with as much fidelity and passion as what was being performed.’
But there were obstacles to overcome: ‘One challenge we had was the space itself,’ says SES Integration Director, Trey Blair, who previously served as a FOH engineer for Elevation Church before joining SES six years ago. ‘It’s a gorgeous room, so we couldn’t change anything about it. We couldn’t create more room where there wasn’t any like we can in new construction. We had to fit the new PA where the old one was; plus, we had to unobtrusively add subs to the room to support the church’s highly dynamic worship style.’
Equally important, the new system had to ensure that the spoken word of Tim Dilena, TSC’s senior pastor for the past two years, could be clearly heard in every seat in the house, including those at the very back of the venue and under the balcony.
‘We used Soundvision to create a model of the space, then acoustically modelled several L-Acoustics solutions in the room, and K3i won hands-down every time,’ Blair says. ‘We needed the impact of a big box but couldn’t have the size of a traditional large-format PA, so K3i fit the bill perfectly and left room for us to fly the subs beside it. Plus, its Panflex technology played a big part in the design of the arrays’ upper enclosures, allowing us to very effectively reach the top of the balcony without energising the hard surfaces on the walls.’
Primarily using the former sound system’s rigging points, SES Integration was able to fly a dozen L-Acoustics K3i enclosures alongside six KS21i subs to the left and right sides of the stage. A single coaxial X8 mounted to the wall below each sub hang provides far left and right fill, while five ultra-compact 5XT aesthetically mounted into the face of the stage deliver front fill. Several X12 located upstage left and right provide choir-fill, while an additional pair downstage serve as wedges for the pastoral team and worship leaders.
To suitably complement the room’s revamped loudspeaker design, SES installed a DiGiCo Quantum338 to serve as the church’s FOH console. This shares a newly-integrated fibre-optic loop with TSC’s twin existing SD-Racks and SD10 consoles: one continuing to facilitate monitor mixes, with the other being repurposed as a dedicated broadcast console for the church’s recently-constructed broadcast mix room. Each of the SD10s was loaded with the latest SD10+ software for additional features and input channels, and SES also supplied a DiGiCo Orange Box with DMI-Optocore and DMI-Madi cards to facilitate connection to the church’s video router for embedded audio.
‘The Quantum338 was our first choice for this project,’ Blair says. ‘It fits into the church’s existing hardware ecosystem and gives them the right channel count, bus count, control surface functionality, and I/O connectivity to serve them today and well into the future. The musicians at Times Square Church are top-notch, given the amazing talent pool that New York City has to offer, and this desk gives the church’s audio team such a great palette of tools to shape a beautiful mix.’
TSC FOH engineer Francisco Mota agrees: ‘I’m really enjoying the Quantum338’s Dynamics and Mustard processing,’ he says. ‘I use a combination of the board’s processors and Waves, but I can’t deny that I prefer to make my vocal mix solid on the DiGiCo processing as much as possible. I also particularly love the ability to move and assign faders on the fly, and both the Snapshot and Solo-in-Place features have been very helpful.’
For LaPrairie, the choice of adding another DiGiCo console was an easy one, given the church’s double – and continuing – successes with the SD-Range desks. ‘We’re going on eight years with our SD10s, and the fact that we’ve had no major failures with them impresses me a lot,’ he notes. ‘That reliability, combined with the Waves integration and the console’s flexibility, helped drive our decision to upgrade our FOH position with a Quantum338.’
With the L-Acoustics and DiGiCo gear in place, the church has a system that can more than adequately keep up with its dynamic and high-energy worship team. ‘This system is keeping the thousands of worshipers that come to TSC on their feet,’ Mota reports. ‘I love the Quantum338 combined with the K3i – the warmth and clarity are all there. The impact it’s had on the audience is incredible, and the responses I’ve heard are overwhelming.’
‘Hearing this system in this room for the first time was breathtaking – the amount of energy was palpable, and it continues to impress,’ LaPrairie adds. ‘Working with SES on this project was such a great experience because we were able to share our ideas and lean on their expertise, and that partnership brought us to what was certainly the best solution gear-wise. We’re all extremely happy with the results and excited about the potential of what this system will continue to bring to our worship experiences.’
