What to know:
- Overcoming low ceilings and hard room reflections, a tailored point-source deployment brings high-energy worship and crystal-clear preaching to every seat.
- By bringing the speakers closer to the audience, Stage Audio Works achieved complete coverage while drastically reducing room reflections.
- Tailored for contemporary worship, The Father’s House Church system uses Plus Audio CPH212 and CPH210 point-source speakers complemented by CPU105 front fills and ET218B subwoofers.
Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth)-based Father’s House Church had a classic contemporary worship challenge: a wide seating layout, low ceilings, and polished concrete floors. To elevate both high-energy worship and clear, articulate preaching, the church partnered with long-time integration partner Stage Audio Works (SAW) to install a distributed Plus Audio system engineered specifically to handle the building's physical real estate.
[Now Available: The Integration Guide to House of Worship]
Balancing impactful music with intelligible spoken word demands uniform coverage across the entire room. Instead of driving high volume from a traditional front-of-house array, which triggers harsh acoustic reflections in wide, hard-surfaced spaces, SAW adopted a decentralized approach. By bringing the speakers closer to the audience, SAW achieved complete coverage while drastically reducing room reflections.
"In spaces with reflective concrete floors and low head-height, pushing sound across long distances usually backfires, creating a wash of room reflections that buries the vocals," explained Kieren Hempel of Stage Audio Works. "By distributing Plus Audio point-source cabinets in localized zones, we keep direct acoustic energy focused right where the congregation is sitting. It delivers dynamic worship impact and vocal precision without forcing FOH to fight the building."
Tailored for contemporary worship, The Father’s House Church system uses Plus Audio CPH212 and CPH210 point-source speakers for clear, controlled main and delay coverage, complemented by CPU105 front fills and ET218B subwoofers for warm low-end headroom. Driven by networked AC415 and AC420 Dante amplifiers, the system relies on onboard DSP and FIR filtering to ensure an uncompromised signal chain and exact time alignment across all zones.
For the church’s technical production crew, the biggest day-to-day win is consistency of the sound mix. By eliminating volume drop-offs and uneven frequency response across the sanctuary, FOH engineers can mix with complete confidence, knowing that what they hear at the sound desk faithfully translates to the back row and side wings.
"The SAW team understood our vision from the very beginning," said Vincent Swanepoel of Father’s House Church. "They presented us with clear, well-considered design approaches tailored specifically to our space, making it easy for leadership to approve a system that serves our entire congregation every Sunday. The collaboration felt natural, and the final result speaks for itself."
