Construction of Calvary Baptist's new Clearwater campus began winter of 2004. Thrasher Design Group of Kennesaw, Ga., was retained to design the system, while Technical Resource Group of Largo, Fla., performed the installation. The physical shape of the room presented an audio design challenge. Principal consultant Bill Thrasher describes the sanctuary as "a fan-shaped room, not one of my favorite kinds of spaces to design for because the curved rear wall is difficult to deal with acoustically."
To minimize reflections back to the stage, Thrasher devised a semi-distributed system consisting of three rings of ceiling-hung loudspeaker clusters. Each cluster consists of one CQ-2 narrow coverage main loudspeaker paired with a USW-1P compact subwoofer. "It's very much a near-field concept, with a lot of direct sound to every seat," notes Thrasher. There are three clusters in the first ring, four clusters in the middle ring, and six more in the outer ring. To maintain clean sightlines to the room's video screens, the clusters are hung at a nominal height of about 28 feet, and angled downward as much as 50° to keep sound off the walls to the greatest extent possible. Even in Calvary Baptist's large auditorium, no seat is more than 80 feet from a speaker. Rounding out the system is Meyer Sound's RMS remote monitoring system, which provides real-time operating data from every loudspeaker in the system.
"I like to tune the room, not the speaker," Thrasher explains. "When I get good direct sound from the loudspeaker to each listener, then I can use room acoustics to control reflections. I'm a big fan of using as little EQ as possible."