Nazareth Lutheran Church - Cedar Falls, IA
Over 150 years ago, a group of Danish emigrants settled in Blackhawk County, Iowa, and were moved by the Holy Spirit to pray and establish a new body of Christ. Nazareth Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church was established, later to become Nazareth Evangelical Lutheran Church (nicknamed “Naz”), and became a body of believers passionate about inviting people to know Christ, to grow in Christ, and then to make Christ known. Located in the heart of Cedar Falls, Iowa near the University of Northern Iowa, Nazareth is a multi-generational ministry that reaches people of all ages.
For years, the team at Naz found themselves trying to reach and be relevant to all ages through a choir and piano based worship style in their traditional service, a full band leading with modern pop rock worship songs for the contemporary service, and also hosting collegiate outreach gatherings at various times through the year. The church reached out to Vantage Pro to engage in a Foresight Design process designed to lead them through the discussion and creation of a vision for how technology could help them adapt their facility to provide maximum engagement for each style of worship, preferably without sacrificing any one of those worship styles in order to enhance the other. And the ability to adapt the room for each style needed to happen quickly, as turnover between services could be as quick as 30 minutes. The ability to create an engaging sound, and look, in a traditional style venue was the challenge for the team to collaboratively solve during our Foresight Kickoff.
For (former) Lead Pastor Brian King and Music Director Nathaniel Parish, the audio was the most critical upgrade to be made to allow all of the various worship styles to engage the congregation. While the existing system was unintelligible for much of the room, Pastor Brian insisted that the audio not only be better, but among the best systems available to ensure that the word and worship would be heard clearly and evenly throughout the 1500 seat auditorium. Nathaniel had lofty goals as well, already doing a combined service once per quarter where the choir, piano, full band, and orchestra could all play together to blend the worship styles. Speech intelligibility was already a challenge with their system, having that many musicians and singers on stage had no intelligibility at all. Traditional left-right (with side fill) systems were modeled and discussed, but it was at that time that the second generation L-ISA processor from L-Acoustics came out, making a hyper-real, immersive style system much more accessible price wise. In addition, while the church was asking for a highly capable audio system, they were asking for it to have a lower visual impact. Having line arrays that would drop down into the eyeline of the choir and organ chambers was highly discouraged, the desire was to try and keep the speaker system as tight to the ceiling as possible.
Working closely with the design team at L-Acoustics, in addition to proposing a more traditional left-right system, the Vantage Pro team also brought forward the concept of the L-Acoustics L-Isa system based around the A10i series speaker. “Designing an audio system that can cover 1500 seats with even coverage, sound amazing for everything from choir and orchestra to a full rock band, and not hang down more than 5-6’ from the ceiling is no small task,” explains Marc Breda, Project Lead for Vantage Pro. “We know L-Acoustics makes speakers that sound amazing, but the ability to spatially locate objects in the mix onto those amazing sounding speakers has to be heard to be believed.”
“Our new L-ISA speaker system has been such a huge improvement in clarity and fullness,” says Nathaniel. “We recently had an event with 25 singers and musicians on stage, and it sounded great. We could have never pulled that off with our old sound system.”
In addition to a new speaker system, the rest of the audio system was also designed and implemented in phase 1 of the build. A complete Allen & Heath mixing system with a C3500 console served as the backbone of the system, working closely with the L-Acoustics L-Isa processor. Aging wireless systems were all replaced as well with Shure ULX-D wireless mics, and the ageing wireless in-ear systems were replaced with Shure PSM 300 systems. The church knew that a great sound system would require great sounding input from the choir, orchestra, piano, and the rest of the band, so a full complement of DPA Microphones choir, orchestra, and headset mics rounded out the microphone system.
The other most mission critical priority, which also made it into phase 1 of the build, was replacing the ineffective projection screens with 14’ x 8.2’ Absen PL 2.9 series LED walls. With windows lining the back wings of the auditorium, projection was ineffective at providing worship lyrics and sermon graphic support unless the shades were down. For the traditional service in particular, the desire was to both leave the windows open and have effective visual support. The Absen LED walls flanking either side of the stage allows all of the beautiful architecture to remain seen, but still be effective despite the windows being open or closed.
While the implementation of the project is being phased in, the Foresight Design process from Vantage Pro is a holistic, master planning approach based on vision. After the audio and screen systems, the next highest priority is to address the lighting. The house and stage lighting are various color temperatures, a common problem that that tends to create significant problems for a streaming video system. More than that, the team at Naz dreamt of converting the room from a bright, natural light filled venue to a controlled, color filled venue with moving light and haze, and sometimes with only a 30 minute change over. Additionally, the vast majority of their lighting fixtures are still using incandescent lamps, so getting power consumption and heat production down has a high value. A comprehensive LED lighting overhaul was designed with full color house lighting, front and top lighting adequate for both streaming and creating a dynamic, in-person experience, and a full compliment of moving lights to create looks you might see out on your favorite tour. Modeling done by the Vantage Pro team during the Foresight Kickoff showed the Naz team that their goal of being able to convert the space from traditional worship to nearly a concert venue in 30 minutes or less was quite possible.
Church Production has a great article on the speaker system you can read here.
Check out the time-laps of our install team as they deployed the L-Isa speaker system.
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