USA - Situated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Christ the King was initiated in 1981 as a Catholic ‘Charismatic Renewal’ church. Its current church building was dedicated in 2001 - and although it may be fairly new by church standards, the church was still operating off its original sound system, which was struggling to provide even coverage across three naves, fanning out from a central space.
“While they had some good seats, some were not so good in terms of coverage, and that was their main impetus for the upgrade,” stated Steve Newby, founder of family-owned AV systems integrator Annunciation Audio-Visual Services, who won a three-way competitive bid.
“While we’ve replaced the electronics a couple of times, and the operators were doing a fantastic job making it sound as good as possible, there was no getting away from the fact that an upgrade was necessary,” he said. This would require addressing the three spaces individually.
Considering all the coverage parameters, and the fact that houses of worship are inherently reverberant spaces, it was deemed necessary that a system with a higher degree of control was essential. As a result, Martin Audio’s smallest Wavefront Precision footprint, WPM, was installed in three L/C/R clusters of six elements in each, along with three SXC118 cardioid subwoofers.
To safeguard against any holes in the front-fill coverage Annunciation specified four CDD10s and a pair of CDD8, and to complete the Martin Audio deployment has provided 24x C6.8T ceiling speakers to “a funky underhung area” - essentially extensions of the left and right naves.
The systems have blended well at Ann Arbor. “The voicing between these three different series in the Martin catalogue was all very consistent and we achieved seat to seat consistency very well,”
Assistant Director of Worship, Adam Plomaritas, who had originally introduced Annunciation AV to the project, stated in summary, “I’ve been a part of several sound changes over the years, and this is the first time the feedback has been 100% positive, both sound wise and aesthetically. There hasn't been a single negative response.”
