The End of An Era

West Auditorium PA – 2010

So I’ve been a little slower in getting posts out lately because my mind has been preoccupied for the last couple months with an upcoming project. I had been fairly certain it was going to happen, but finally received confirmation the first week in July that everything was ordered. I feel I can finally announce that in mid-September, we will be replacing the PA in our West Auditorium. I can’t express in words how exciting this is for me and the rest of our team.

One of the big challenges of operating two main auditoriums running the same programming concurrently within the same facility is those two rooms are always being compared. As staff, we oversee both venues and move between the rooms, and you just can’t help but compare them to each other.

There are some healthy benefits to this because the unspoken competition between rooms can help drive excellence in both venues. The challenge, however, is in keeping this competition healthy while still maintaining an individual perspective on each room. After all, the bands and crews are different for each venue, and that alone will often make the most significant impact on the experience.

While we’ll always be working with different personnel in each venue, this upgrade will put us the closest we’ve ever been in the entire history of our church to having equivalent audio equipment in each of our two main auditoriums. We have gradually been moving everything in this direction since I came on staff, and after working within these challenges for seven years I’m ecstatic to finally be getting things on nearly the same page. The rooms will always be a little different in acoustics and size, and we’re going to learn very soon what a difference that will make. But I’m optimistic it won’t be as large as the differences we’ve been working with as a result of having completely different loudspeaker systems.

I’ll get more into some of the technical stuff as the install date approaches, but in the meantime I’ll just say that the new system will closely match what we did three years ago in our East Auditorium; you can probably find a lot of info on that in the blog archives for Year of the System 2010. We have made a few tweaks for the upcoming system based on some things we learned from the project as well as to accommodate some of the room differences, but I will save those for the coming weeks.