Sunday services at East Sunshine Christian Church are all about singing along. The
church’s contemporary worship style is based around four part acapella harmonies,
led by the group onstage and accompanied by anyone in the congregation who cares
to join in.

East Sunshine’s 1500-seat sanctuary is big, bright, and welcoming, and Sunday
services are well attended, but the church had struggled for some time with an
inefficient sound system. As Worship Minister Randy Wray explains, poor sound and
inconsistent coverage had an impact on the congregation. “We rely on people in the
congregation being able to hear their part,” Wray observes. “When it’s muddled and
there’s no distinction, it’s very hard to sing and appreciate the four-part harmony.”

That all changed thanks to a major renovation of the sanctuary, including a new
sound system featuring Renkus-Heinz ICONYX Gen5 digitally steered array
loudspeakers, designed and installed by Sensory Integration AV of Springfield,
Missouri. Sensory President Darren Smith says the room presented some
interesting challenges.

“It’s a very wide room, with a 60-foot peak in the middle and a very large rear
wall,” Smith begins. “The previous system really didn’t provide the vocal
intelligibility they needed, and coverage was very inconsistent. We’ve actually done
multiple demos of different line arrays in this room, and could never really achieve
the coverage we needed.”

Wray agrees. “The best way to describe the old system was ‘muffled.’ There was
really no intelligibility. It also really mattered where you sat – some people
complained they couldn’t hear, and others said it was too loud.”

Sensory Integration’s solution was to create a left-centre-right system using a pair
of IC Live ICL-FR-N columns to the left and right of the stage and a dual IC2 array
with two IC2-FR systems in the centre, cut into the top of the proscenium. “The
Iconyx beam steering gave us the ability to steer the sound away from the back
walls, dramatically reducing reflections and increasing intelligibility. The L-C-R
configuration also gave us excellent, consistent coverage – you can sit anywhere in
the auditorium and get great sound.”

Randy Wray sums it up: “With the previous system, we could actually get away with
weaker singers onstage. As soon as I heard the new system, my first thought was
that we need to get better onstage, because people are going to hear everything.”