Foursquare Church Upgrades with Meyer Sound

Puyallup Foursquare Church has a history of fast, consistent growth. It began in 1998, when pastors Roger and Tina Archer moved from Seattle to Puyallup, Wash., and started a Bible study group. From that point on, expansion was a constant, as the church outgrew first a junior high school cafeteria, then a 5,000-square-foot space at a Christian preschool, until it finally moved to its current location: a 50,000-square-foot church bought from another local congregation in 2001.

Foursquare Church , Puyallup, Washington

With seating for 1,200 and room for still more growth, the building was suitable but needed an interior upgrade to accommodate Puyallup Foursquare’s upbeat worship style. Leaders decided on a complete remodel, to happen in three phases: a new sound system robust enough to do justice to the high-energy output of the band and choir; new theater-style seating, carpet, paint, and acoustical treatment of reflective surfaces; and technology integration to make the audio seamlessly compatible with webcasts, videos, and other church multimedia efforts. “Basically, we needed systems that won’t limit either our audio or visuals in any way,” says Pastor of Technical Ministries Brent Todd, one that can “handle both live performance and live broadcast as well as recording and videotaping events.”

For the sound system work, the church leaders turned to Steve Palermo, owner of LIFT AV in Seattle, who instantly saw a challenge in the layout of the auditorium itself. Fan-shaped like a baseball field, it has a balcony and a 60-foot-wide stage. In such a potentially reverberant space, the audio would need to capture both individual voices and the big, powerful sound of a full band onstage — clearly more than the room’s legacy equipment could handle. The ideal solution, Palermo decided, would be the M2D compact curvilinear array loudspeaker from Meyer Sound.

“With all the energy that the band, choir, and worship leader put out, they needed a sound system that would provide the same impact (for all of those uses),” he says, “and I immediately thought of the M2D.” To help create the specification, Palermo enlisted Elton Halley of DECK Productions in Stockton, Calif. Reviewing the particulars, Halley looked to Meyer Sound’s acoustical prediction program, MAPP Online Pro, as a crucial tool for the job. “Steve called me and told me what the room was like,” Halley recalls, “and we started to develop them into a design.”

Working from hand-drawn sketches, Halley defined the room in MAPP Online Pro and fine-tuned the loudspeaker system design within it. According to Halley, in the plan they wound up with the arrays are actually set back about six feet from the front of the stage, rather than flush with it, because of the stage location and the dynamics of the room. Even so, he notes that “there are no feedback issues, and we didn’t even have to use a center cluster because the left and right dispersion is so good. It’s perfect.”

The design called for two arrays of five M2D cabinets, with low frequencies provided by a pair of 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers. The array speakers are toed in slightly to minimize any audio interaction with the side walls of the room. “You have to have intelligibility, especially in a church,” Halley says. “You’ve got to hear the word! But they have a great band, too, and these boxes really pack a punch for music. The M2D is my box of choice when I’m designing, and the 700-HP is a perfect complement to it.”

The project faced a slight roadblock when it was time to put the subwoofers in place. MAPP Online Pro had suggested placing them beneath the stage, but the building’s structural foundation had other ideas: “If we would have chiseled out the concrete, we would have hit dirt,” says Palermo. So instead, in a configuration also developed via MAPP Online Pro, Palermo and Halley built soffits to contain the subwoofers in the walls on both sides of the stage area, about three feet off the ground. The idea, Palermo explains, was “to shoot the energy of that sub into the sanctuary rather than having it go up the walls.”

“As a longtime front-of-house engineer, when I walk into a room or onstage and speak with the technicians and engineers, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to work,” he says. And this solution “worked out great. The projection from MAPP came out in real life exactly as predicted.”

In Halley’s eyes, the coverage and response plots generated by MAPP Online Pro make it even more of an asset by providing valuable visual aids that help a client understand the predictions. “MAPP plots really give your customers a confidence boost,” he says. “I don’t want to call it a safety net, but it’s great to be able to visually show them exactly where their system is going to go and what it’s going to do.”

Once the system was installed, Palermo brought in a secret weapon to give the finishing touch. “When it came time to turn the system on and make it sound right, in came Elton with [legendary live-sound innovator] ‘Dr. Don’ Pearson from Meyer Sound, God rest his soul. This was the last tuning project he worked on.

“When we started this job, Elton had said they were going to be there, to make sure our clients were very, very happy. And that was achieved.”

For additional information on Meyer Sound products, visit: www.meyersound.com