Outline has provided the audio platform for the newly completed 3,600-seat sanctuary at the largest evangelical church in Romania, Biserica Penticostală nr. 1.
The church’s hall is hexagonal, with its widest section – 40m across – sitting immediately in front of the stage. Wall and ceiling treatment, complemented by bass traps installed under every balcony soffit, had already produced a controlled acoustic environment.
Against this backdrop, the loudspeaker system had to satisfy a tight set of aesthetic and operational constraints: no subwoofers, neither flown nor floor-standing; a minimal visual footprint to match the venue’s all-white interior; an extended low end down to 60Hz,– ideally 50Hz, to support the bass instrument in the orchestra; and ease of operation in a small town where qualified audio engineers are scarce.
The stage itself created a further challenge. A 200-voice choir and an 80-piece orchestra are positioned on stage, facing each other across a wide gap, with a high count of open condenser microphones and no in-ear monitoring. They need to hear every instrument and voice clearly, and they must follow the pulpit and the entire service from their fixed positions.
The central area of the stage also hosts smaller groups with guitars, accordions and similar instruments, so the 300 people seated in the choir and orchestra zone must hear what the audience hears.
Screenshot
In this scenario, the Side Acoustic Rejection Technology of Outline’s Superfly quad-amped line-array system was key: by containing rear emission, it keeps the stage area free of unwanted low-frequency energy.
The final configuration is an L-R full-range design without subwoofers. Each side comprises six Superfly modules and two Mantas 28 down-fills that deliver 120° of horizontal coverage, with four ultra-compact Vegas 24s covering the first few rows as front-fills.
On stage, behind the main clusters, two Scala 90 enclosures per side are flown at about 7.5m to serve the choir and orchestra. Amplification is provided by four TTM12K4 and three TTM8K4 units.
The compact format of the Superfly cabinet – 9″ in height for a 2×10″ enclosure – was an additional factor in preserving the carefully designed aesthetics of the hall. The system design was supported by acoustic simulations carried out in Outline OpenArray 2.
Screenshot
Lucian Galea, owner of QuattroSound, which designed and undertook the installation, says: “As soon as Pierfrancesco d’Aloisio, sales engineer at Outline, shared the Superfly technical specifications, I realised this was one of the very few line arrays – perhaps the only one – capable of meeting every requirement of this hexagonal hall.
“The client’s directive on visual footprint was unequivocal. Other manufacturers we consulted insisted that at least three suspended clusters were technically mandatory, with more complex and visually invasive layouts. The simulations we ran in OpenArray 2 told a different story: an L-R configuration would deliver homogeneous coverage to every seat.
“The brief on stage was demanding in its own way. With the choir and orchestra working entirely on open microphones and no in-ear monitoring, the system had to behave with discipline behind the line arrays.
“Superfly did exactly that – and the musicians were taken aback by the clarity and naturalness of the Scala 90 too, even at a flying height of 7.5m.
“The second challenge was to cover the stalls and the first balcony, while leaving the second tier as a future expansion. The result took the client by surprise: speech intelligibility was remarkable even in the second tier, with minimal SPL fall-off.
“Sound was the aspect they were most concerned about – and it ended up being the most rewarding part of the entire project. Some of them had recently toured the largest American evangelical churches, and told me they had never heard ‘a sound like this’ anywhere.
“This experience has changed the way I think about line arrays and opens new directions for my future projects.”