DANLEY ENGINEERS SYSTEM DESIGN FOR CALVARY CHAPEL IN VERO BEACH

After years of steady increase, Calvary Chapel in Vero Beach, Florida had the welcome problem of outgrowing its 350-seat sanctuary. The church came up with a plan to demolish two older buildings and erect a new 600-seat sanctuary. They relied on member Joey Hale and his integration firm, Propulsion AV, to design and install an intelligible, big-impact, sound reinforcement system for the room. Hale, in turn, relied on Danley Sound Labs’ patented loudspeaker and subwoofer technologies to make good on his responsibility, with big help from Danley’s on-staff engineers for the system design and commissioning.

“Although we don’t run full concert-level SPLs, our services are very contemporary,” explained Hale. “We have a full band with a couple of acoustic guitars, a couple of electric guitars, keyboards, bass, a drum kit, a percussionist and vocalists. Our new sanctuary is approximately ninety feet across and seventy-five feet deep, with a tall, thirty-foot ceiling. It’s a big, industrial-style building, and the architect worked within our budget to make the most of the acoustics. The walls are lined with corrugated metal sheeting, which helps with some things but does make the room a little bright. The floors are concrete, but the padding on the chairs and people help. The ceiling is open, which allows the insulation to help with the sound.”

Hale continued, “I walked into a Danley demo at InfoComm in Orlando a few years ago, and I was blown away! I liked how articulate the Danley boxes were, which is especially important in a church setting where you want spoken and sung vocals to come through clean. The Danley boxes had nice, clean mids that weren’t muddy, nice musical low end, and high end that was perfectly present but not at all piercing. It was an ideal mix of what I’m looking for in a speaker. At one point during our planning meetings there was talk of going with a line array, but I felt that Danley was a better choice. Bencsik Associates [the area Danley rep] came out to our old sanctuary and simply laid a few Danley boxes on the stage so everyone could hear the Danley sound. Later, to really prove the concept, we took a trip up to Calvary Chapel Melbourne where they have Danley rigs throughout their campus. Everyone liked them, and the guys at Melbourne had glowing reviews, which added to our peace of mind.”

Hale sent the engineers at Danley the layout and dimensions of the new sanctuary, and they returned a plan that would give the sanctuary even coverage while minimizing energy on the walls and ceiling. The plan included every nuance, down to the precise angle of each loudspeaker. A single center-flown Danley SH96 Synergy Horn loudspeaker covers the majority of the room, with a Danley SH95 hanging below it for front fill. Two Danley SH60s fill in the sides from positions six feet off-center in either direction. A single, beefy Danley DBH218 subwoofer provides generous low-end support from a flown position eight feet in front of the main cluster. A pair of four-channel Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifiers with built-in DSP power and process the system, with input from a Yamaha TF5 digital mixer.

“Everyone was blown away with the sound as soon as we turned it on,” Hale said. “Even before we adjusted the gains or tweaked the EQ… things sounded pretty close to perfect. We used each model’s preset – built-in to the Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifiers – as a starting point. Again, the engineers at Danley were super helpful during the commissioning. I was on the phone with Chad [Edwardson] for over an hour on a few occasions. He helped me understand everything that I needed to do to get the room right. In the end, we really only equalized to get rid of one particular frequency that was causing problems and increased the bass a little bit beyond Danley’s original recommendation. The only remaining tweak is to splay out the side fills by a few degrees since we added a few seats since the original layout that I sent to Danley.”