Details:
- Santo Domingo’s new Monte de Dios recently opened its doors with an L-Acoustics K2 loudspeaker system designed by Wholestage and integrated by SVL.
- Seating nearly 8,000 worshipers, L-Acoustics-equipped Monte de Dios is now the largest Christian church in the Caribbean.
- The main system comprises 48 L-Acoustics K2 flown as four arrays of 12, paired with a central cluster of 16 KS28 subwoofers in two hangs of eight.
Monte de Dios Brings Big Sonic Upgrade to the Caribbean
When Ministerio Internacional Monte de Dios opened the doors of its new home in Santo Domingo on July 17, 2026, it did so as the largest Christian church in the Caribbean. More than a decade in the making, the new worship space rises from a 484,376-square-foot campus seats nearly 8,000 worshipers around a central stage. Its leaders were determined that the new building be matched by sound worthy of its scale: every seat, from the front row to the far end of the arc, had to receive the same clear speech and the same full-range music. To reach that standard, the choice of L-Acoustics came naturally.
[Now Available: The Integration Guide to House of Worship]
Church management set a benchmark of no more than 3 dB of level variation between any two seats in the house, an exacting target for even coverage across a nearly 180-degree audience. Speech intelligibility was the first priority, but the music had to carry equal weight. As Jonathan Del Villar, CTO and managing partner at Wholestage, an L-Acoustics certified provider distributor (CPd) for the Dominican Republic, explained, that was a challenge as the band stays on stage the whole time, and there is a lot of energy from every angle.
Miguel Bogaert Jr., son of the founding pastor and closely involved in the church’s technology decisions, is a longtime follower of L-Acoustics. “The church intentionally wanted to create a worship space that provided a high-fidelity experience,” said Del Villar. Wholestage designed the system and brought in locally based integrator SoundVideoLight (SVL), which has 15 years of audiovisual experience in the region, to handle the installation alongside the church’s lighting, rigging, and show-control infrastructure.
Church leadership “really did its homework,” Del Villar noted, studying how comparable congregations across the region had solved the same problem. With the brief set, Wholestage designed the church sound system around L-Acoustics K2, modeling coverage in L-Acoustics Soundvision to confirm even level and intelligibility across the full arc before a single enclosure was flown. L-Acoustics supported the design at every stage.
“We had strong support from L-Acoustics throughout the entire project. Josh Maichele, global application lead for house of worship, was heavily involved, especially during the design stage,” Del Villar said. It was Maichele who proposed a flown end-fire and cardioid configuration for the KS28 subwoofers. “It is an almost 180-degree seating area, so this was a very effective way to ensure there were no low-end cancellations anywhere in the auditorium,” he added.
Final calibration was carried out with L-Acoustics M1 and P1 against the Soundvision predictions, with L-Acoustics application engineer Alex Soto on-site alongside the Wholestage and SVL teams, the latter being led by SVL operations and project manager Pedro Abreu.
The main system comprises 48 K2 flown as four arrays of 12, paired with a central cluster of 16 KS28 subwoofers in two hangs of eight, set in the combined end-fire and cardioid arrangement. Eight X8 provide front-fill and hangs of one A15i Focus over two A15i Wide per side deliver side-fill, while two X12, one per side, serve as delays. Onstage, four X15 HiQ act as monitors. The K2 mains are granularly driven by 192 channels of LA7.16i amplified controller power, for paramount consistency over the audience, and the KS28 subwoofers are powered by a dozen LA12X amplified controllers. Del Villar also specified three DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles for front-of-house, monitor, and broadcast mixes.
The result is a room where the 3 dB target holds from the first row to the last, and where the low end is felt as clearly as it is heard. On its opening weekend, an auditorium of worshipers, joined by Dominican President Luis Abinader, heard both the music and the message land with the same clarity in every seat. “They wanted their members and visitors to feel the band, the drums, and with this system, they really do,” Del Villar concluded. “L-Acoustics has become the standard for houses of worship because it lets you hear the truth."
