Contemporary Trent Vineyard Achieves Versatile Audio with d&b

	Trent Vineyard Church

Located just two miles from the historical City of Nottingham, England, in an edge-of-town location, Trent Vineyard is a vibrant, contemporary church where worship plays a vital role. One of approximately one hundred and twenty Vineyard churches in the UK and Ireland (and 2,500 two worldwide).

A central auditorium, capable of welcoming more than 1,200 people for Sunday services, talks, and music events means that Trent Vineyard is also one of the largest auditorium spaces in the region. The venue and its amenities, when not in use by the church, are made available to the wider corporate community as a conference center.

In 2017 the venue was expanded and refurbished, the church turned to AV supplier SFL to design and install a system capable of meeting their various needs, along with those of a fast-turnaround corporate conferencing clientele.

Pat Smith of SFL explains, "Trent Vineyard was already a happy d&b audiotechnik customer. So, when it came to designing a new system for the larger, differently-shaped space, we had a good starting point in terms of what the outcome should be."

The expanded auditorium space is the same in depth, but substantially wider than it was previously. This challenge was key to the SFL approach to system design. Smith continues: "Consistent and even sound coverage is critically important, and actually fairly easy to achieve from the stage to the back of the auditorium. The more complex task was extending that even coverage to the far left and right corners of the room."

As well as using d&b ArrayCalc to model the performance of various designs in the new space prior to the construction being completed, SFL physically configured a number of different installation options for testing to ensure that the ideal audio setup was achieved.

The result is based around four arrays of four Y8 loudspeakers and Vi-GSUBs. Coverage is then enhanced by three newly-installed E8 loudspeakers, along with eight E0s and two E3s repurposed from the pre-existing system. Amplification is provided by four 30Ds.

Smith expands, "Much of the old d&b system was used in equipping the Trent Vineyard purpose-built on site Kids' Center; itself a new, fairly big space. The rest we were able to repurpose seamlessly in the expanded auditorium. First, we tested those loudspeakers, measuring their performance today against what it was when they were brand new. We found that for the most part, the difference was undetectable, even after 15 years of hard use."

Particular to an auditorium of this kind is the variety of uses for which the in-house sound team must cater. James McBrien, sound overseer at Trent Vineyard, explains: "Large-scale corporate conference events place very different demands on our sound system compared to those of a wedding with three hundred guests. Even for our two Sunday services, there's a wider age range in the morning than in the evening, so we can mix bands differently at the services. The d&b R1 remote control software allows me to make subtle adjustments quickly and easily. It's not so much a case of being as loud as possible, it's all about being flexible, and as loud as is appropriate."

McBrien continues, "The feedback I've had on a Sunday and from conferencing clients is that the recent upgrade has massively elevated the level of sound quality. For me, apart from the greater versatility we now have, our sound is also smoother, cleaner, and more rounded."