CENTRAL CHRISTIAN CHURCH EXPANDS WITH CDD-LIVE

The Glendale Campus of the Central Christian Church recently converted the second story of its worship center into a student ministry and installed a Martin Audio CDD-LIVE speaker system.

The student ministry is for 7th through 12th graders and has its own services with electric bands and a different message than the worship center downstairs. Asked about the difference, Central Christian Lead Audio Engineer Milk Arnold explains: 'The sermons are more focused on issues that affect the younger members and we mix our music a lot louder––I let the engineers really go to town and the kids love it!

'In terms of the room, we're playing wide in this room which is about 40 feet wide by 20 feet deep. That's why Martin Audio CDD-LIVE speakers are a perfect choice for the space. We mounted four CDD-LIVE 15's with ­two covering the basic left-right and the other two positioned as outfills to cover the width of the room. There are also two CDD-LIVE 8's on the wall inside the 15's that function as infills.'

Milk confirms CDD-LIVE was chosen because, 'a point source box was a much better solution since there are trim height issues in the room which is short front to back. I needed something that would cover properly from the height I had. That, plus the CDD-LIVE's differential dispersion, concentric horn technology––which provides coverage that's wider closer to the box and narrower further away––gives us the nice, predictable rectangular coverage we need for the room.

'I also love that the CDD-LIVE is a self-powered and Dante-enabled box because we're in the process of changing over all the campuses to Dante networking so any room can talk to any other room. The Dante system allows repeatability and stability, and can be easily expanded. Also, eliminating the need for power and speaker processing is a major benefit because I can send anything to these speakers and the system is tuned and time-aligned without any external processing which saves a lot of time and makes everything a lot easier.'

Asked about CDD-LIVE's audio performance, Milk responds, 'they excel for music reproduction and work very well for speech. In this space, we use headworn and hand-held mics and we can get the rig to work well enough that when they're doing a talking head event, we don't need an engineer and it still sounds smooth and solid.

'Bottom line, if you're a fan of the Martin Audio voice, CDD-LIVE is a perfect continuation of that voicing and tonality. It's adaptability and consistency is remarkable, better than most self-powered speakers I've ever used.

'Best of all, the church is very happy and pleased with the audio quality and coverage,' Milk concludes.  'They appreciate the fact that I've moved towards Martin Audio in general. As you know, we have an MLA Compact system in the main worship center on the Mesa campus and most all our secondary spaces are going to Martin Audio-based systems. As the church's demands for the worship spaces increase, I've had to continually improve the quality of the audio and Martin Audio has proven to be an excellent choice.