Meyer Sound Leopards power Georgia church
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The new system is flown inside the main worship auditorium at 12Stone’s Sugarloaf campus, where a rapid renovation last summer reconfigured the 900-capacity room to serve as a hybrid combination of live worship space and video production studio. With the old point-source system already slated for replacement, a new Leopard-based solution was the odds-on favourite as Leopard arrays already had been installed at four other 12Stone campuses.
“We went with Leopard because we’re so accustomed to it,” says Taylor Davis, production director for the church. “It’s part of our audio DNA at this point. But for this new ministry, it also gives us extraordinary flexibility. We have enough Leopard elements and subwoofers to change the room to in-the-round with four arrays. It makes us very nimble, so we can work in any room configuration. In fact, all the production in here is touring-style, with portable decking so we can turn the room or put the stage at centre.”
In its current iteration, the room has three distinct areas, with a cafe teaching environment on one side, a performance area centre, and a living room teaching environment for the pastor’s teaching on the other side.
When the pandemic lockdown hit last summer, the 12Stone production staff worked with systems integrator Clark, headquartered in nearby Alpharetta, to get new technologies up and running at lightning speed. “It was critical that the new concept get up and running so church members felt connected,” says Luke Roetman of Clark. “Meyer Sound partnered with us to move quickly, so we had everything in place inside four weeks.”
In its current end-on configuration, the system comprises nine LEOPARD compact line array loudspeakers per side, with two 900‑LFC low-frequency control elements flown behind each main array. Seven 1100‑LFC elements are on the ground with two ULTRA‑X40 as side-fills and six UP‑4slim as front-fills. Clark’s Tom Donohue supervised the system design with final tuning by Clark’s Ed Crippen.
According to Frazier, improvements realized by the new system were noteworthy. “I could immediately tell a difference in 8 kHz and above. The clarity without harshness is incredible. Also, the low end is tight and responsive. The 1100-LFCs gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of punch without being overwhelming.”
