To elevate its famously energetic musical worship services, Australia’s Emerge Church has installed Powersoft’s high-performance T Series amplifiers as part of a major upgrade to its audio system.
Located in the North Brisbane region of Queensland, the Pentecostal Emerge Church has three locations, with its main church in the suburb of Warner. The Warner building includes a 450-seat auditorium whose AV set-up is key to a typical church service, which includes a full band of drums, bass guitar, electric and acoustic guitars, keyboards, and 4–6 vocalists.
The original PA system, which was installed in 2000, when the Warner church opened, comprised four 12” horn (point-source) cabinets (2 per side) and two 18in subs under the stage. “In recent years, we noticed that the system was sounding tired and lacking the definition required for clean and clear vocal reproduction,” said Ash Webber, one of Emerge Church’s head audio engineers, explaining the decision to upgrade its AV facilities.
“Achieving even frequency and SPL coverage throughout the auditorium has always been a challenge, and at times this led to comments from the congregation that the audio mix was too loud in some seats while being too soft or lacking clarity in others.”
Emerge Church’s last annual conference provided an ideal opportunity to audition prospective PA and amplifier options. (An earlier audio upgrade had seen the church purchase an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 console, with DM48 mix rack and Dante card, and four Electro-Voice EVU-2062 front-fill speakers to augment the original PA system). For the conference, Harry Lloyd-Williams, founding director of Brisbane-based manufacturer AT Professional, provided the company’s TLA508 Blackbird line-array system, with power supplied by Powersoft T Series amplifiers.
Suitably impressed by the combination of the AT speakers and Powersoft amps – the primary criteria for an upgraded sound system were even and clean coverage throughout all seats, for both music and speech reinforcement – the church leadership endorsed the system and approved an upgrade to the original PA.
The new speaker set-up, tuned by Brendan Keane, adds eight AT Professional TLA508 line-array cabinets (four per side), as well as two AT Professional CLA LF3200 18” subs under the stage. Both the new loudspeakers and the existing EV front fills are powered by four 6,000W, four-channel Powersoft T604 amplifiers.
At Emerge Church, all signal processing is done within the T604s, which have built-in loudspeaker DSP, while input signals are delivered via the on-board Dante capability. The T Series’ high voltage is also ideal for sharing power between the channels for applications such as bi-amped loudspeakers or subwoofers with passive tops.
“The new AT Professional PA system and Powersoft amplification combination has delivered our goal of even coverage and clear audio with exceptional results,” explained fellow head audio engineer Rob Camilleri. “The new system has been well received by the church leadership, congregation, worship band, audio engineers and guest speakers, and delivered increased intelligibility, musical definition and headroom.
“We thoroughly recommend and endorse the Powersoft amplifier platform and AT Professional for their exceptional customer service and quality products.”
Check out Installation‘s houses of worship special report here.
