Bay St. Louis, Mississippi-March 2016…Founded in 1896, the First Baptist Church of
Bay St. Louis moved into a new worship center in 2009. Disappointed with the
original sound system after a few years, the church hired contractor Engineered
Lighting and Sound to design and build a new system based on Renkus-Heinz IC
Live-series digitally steerable loudspeakers.

The new system was installed and commissioned in early 2015.

“The auditorium is essentially a 75- by 75-foot box with a 25-foot ceiling, and it’s
fairly reverberant,” explains Engineered Lighting & Sound Owner Eric Ross. “We
needed to cover a balcony in the rear, as well as the floor seating, with one set of
speakers that we could conceal.’

For the mains, Ross chose a pair of Renkus-Heinz IC Live ICL-FR-DUAL digitally
steerable loudspeakers, mounting one on each side of the stage. The ICL-FR-DUAL
employs five 6.5-inch cone transducers and three 1-inch high-frequency
compression drivers in a slim enclosure that’s easy to conceal.

Ross also installed a pair of Renkus-Heinz CFX218S dual 18-inch subwoofers. The
CFX218S is a high-impact, high-level subwoofer capable of 132 dB SPL, and a pair
of them easily delivers the low frequencies required for concerts.
One challenge with this install was hiding the mains and subwoofers while delivering
unimpeded sound and providing a quality projection screen. “The worship team was
projecting images onto the wall up front, and next to that about eight feet up were
some unattractive organ speaker grilles they wanted to get rid of,” Ross recalls. “So
I ordered custom, cinema-type Da-Lite projector screens made of perforated
material that allows sound to penetrate. We mounted the main speakers and
subwoofers behind the projection screens, and we took the old grilles out. Then I
did a bit of carpentry for the wall side of the line array. I put some wood there and
mounted the subwoofers, so it’s like an extension of the wall into the mounting
hole. It almost looks like a horn. That keeps sound from disappearing back into the
mounting holes, and the main speakers and subwoofers are completely invisible to
the audience.”

Behind the stage is a low choir loft, with the grand piano at stage right and organ at
stage left. To cover this area, Ross chose a Renkus-Heinz VARIA VAX101-22/12
modular point-source line array. The VARIA offers a 22.5 degree vertical by 120
degree horizontal dispersion and features Renkus-Heinz’ proprietary progressive
waveguides, which create a narrower pattern at the top, tapering to a wider pattern
at the bottom. “The VARIA fit perfectly in the original speaker cluster position,”
explains Ross. “The narrow vertical dispersion prevented splashing on the rest of
the platform, and the horizontal dispersion let me use one cabinet where I would
otherwise have to use several.”

Of course, for any contractor, what matters most is the client’s opinion. “The people
at First Baptist Church absolutely love their new Renkus-Heinz system,” Ross
enthuses. “The praise band loves the way they sound. Everybody is delighted.”