Church Chooses Bag End Subs for "Natural Listening Experience"

The Philadelphia Baptist Church of Deville, Louisiana recently replaced the central speaker system in its auditorium -- a system that had experienced multiple failures -- and took advantage of that replacement to upgrade the church's entire sound system, including the installation of Bag End powered subwoofers to supply the bass energy that would support the sound.

Deville is a town of only 1,007 inhabitants, but this Southern Baptist Church serves a much larger congregation, drawn from other communities in the Alexandria-Pineville area of central Louisiana. Providing music for the services attended by this audience involves both an orchestra and choir, and it was important to both the church leaders and the congregation that the sound system projecting this music be both reliable and faithful in its reproduction.

The audio renovation was completed in two stages. The immediate need was for an emergency repair of the central speaker cluster. Rather than continuing with components that had failed multiple times in the past, the owner agreed to move forward with a new central speaker design, which was completed pre-renovation.

The complete sound system design that followed during auditorium renovation featured five Bag End PD18-AD powered dual 18" subwoofers with a Bag End Infra MXB integrator, along with five custom-designed cavities and hard wood louver covers. The design also included an LCR stereo playback system, a choir monitoring system, four conventional stage monitor circuits mixed from the house console, and an Aviom personal monitor system.

The Bag End subwoofers were selected to provide the most natural listening experience with extended low frequency performance and no coloration of the bass frequency energy as is found in most other subs that use tuned boxes or tuned ports.

"The best way I can describe hearing Bag End bass," says system designer Jim Young, owner of Current Design in Acoustics, Rustin, Louisiana, "is that of not noticing that they are there; the bass energy fills the room with authority, yet without bringing attention to the anomalies usually associated with sub-bass projection into an auditorium from a conventional speaker."

Philadelphia Baptist Church uses a full orchestra and choir each Sunday. Passive acoustical diffusion in the ceiling over the congregation supports congregational ensemble and blending, while over the choir/orchestra area a high density wide bandwidth diffusion surface provides blending and ensemble for the choral performance area.

Since completion, the church leadership has consistently received comments about the pleasure of worshiping in this auditorium. The experience is that of both clarity and power, and the subwoofer experience is relaxed but powerful, with the perception that the sound system is not made up of parts, but rather a seamless auditory spectrum extending well below sub-bass and into a physical experience with the music.