Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Greensboro, NC, saw a standing room only attendance of 3000 for their Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service on January 21st, part of a city wide celebration of the life and achievements of the civil rights leader. A brand new Electro-Voice XLCi sound system installed by local company CareySound ensured every word was heard loud and clear.

The service at Mt. Zion Church was the culmination of a full day of community activities celebrating Dr. King‘s life. Greensboro played an important role in the ‘60s civil rights movement, as the site of some of the first mass “sit in” lunch counter protests. The power-packed event at Mt. Zion Baptist featured special guest artists Phillip Bryant, Lil‘ Mo, and multiple 2008 Stellar Award winner, Dewayne Woods, backed by a 100-member community mass choir. Dr. John Guns of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida was the featured guest speaker.

The event also marked the debut of Mt. Zion‘s new EV sound system to the community at large. The sound system was designed and installed by local systems integrator CareySound. Company owner Ken Carey, along with VP of Sales Tommy Martin, and John Carey, HE, were on hand to handle the engineering duties for the evening.

Ken Carey and Stuart Schatz of Electro-Voice faced several challenges when designing the new sound system: “The 10 year old system we replaced never really addressed the serious issues in the room,” Carey says. “Aside from being very wide, this sanctuary is built back to front in comparison to an auditorium, with the tall part of the room at the front and the short part at the rear with a balcony. This arrangement effectively funnels all of the sound down into the back rows, presenting many more reflective surfaces in the process. And all this was in addition to a very loud HVAC system.”

The original system consisted of a very large, tightly packed left/center/right trapezoidal speaker configuration with overlapping conical horn coverage. Additionally, multiple smaller cabinets had been added to the space to try and compensate for the very patchy sound distribution in the auditorium. “They drove the system hard to address the seat-to-seat variations in coverage and the loud HVAC system,” Carey adds, “attempting to cover the imperfections in sound distribution in the auditorium. These high sound levels very quickly swamped the room, adding to the already complicated acoustics of the space.”

The solution to this unique combination of issues was the installation of a precisely focusable Electro-Voice XLCi loudspeaker line-array. Dual 13-element Line Arrays, each consisting of eight XLCi127DVX boxes hung under four XLCi215 subs, flank the stage powered by eight Electro-Voice P3000RL remote supervised Precision Series Amplifiers. “Utilizing the great sounding, high performance, XLCi loudspeaker system with the aid of EV‘s powerful LAPS aiming software, we were able to design a verifiably accurate system with complete confidence,” Carey continues. “All of the issues created by the original 32-box, 29-amplifier system, along with the oddly shaped room and loud HVAC system, were overcome with the new system. Everybody in the sold out auditorium tonight had the best seat in the house!”

In addition to the main EV house system, a spread of new VariLine™ loudspeakers from Dynacord® serve as stage monitors. The new wireless microphone system is the EV REV UHF System with RE410 mic capsules.

www.electrovoice.com

www.careysound.com

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