The Christian Revival Church (CRC) calls itself ’one church in many locations’. Indeed, CRC has seven branches all over South Africa including Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Welkom, George, Thaba Nchu and Botshabelo and has seen substantial growth over the past 20 years since its establishment.

The Christian Revival Church’s senior pastors At and Nyretta Boshoff founded the house of worship in 1994 in Ladybrand and it has flourished from its humble beginnings there into several large congregations, culminating in their latest building, CRC Pretoria; a 7 000-seater sanctuary auditorium.

CRC Pretoria was established in 2004; starting off in a school hall and later moving into a 2 500-seater tent auditorium. Through hard work and an ardent “debt-free’ ethos, the Boshoffs set their goals on building the state-of-the-art CRC Pretoria auditorium that was finally completed in February 2014 after breaking ground in 2012.

A large part of building a state-of-the-art auditorium is sourcing and installing state-of-the-art audio, lighting and audio visual equipment. Churches all over the world are following this trend not only to make the experience for church-goers more exciting and engaging, but to make sure the message is broadcast clearly and effectively.
Bringing a twist of practicality to an installation of this nature is the fact that while church services and activities happen quite regularly, much of the time the auditorium is left unused. For this reason, one of the main points of the client brief was to create a venue that was capable of being utilised by third parties for large events when the church was not using it for its own activities.

What this means is installing top-shelf equipment and in order to do that you need the help of local distributors and installers that carry premium brands that not only local professionals are familiar with, but potential international guests as well.

Audio

The audio system at CRC is exclusively L-Acoustics (apart from various stage monitors held over from the previous installation) supplied and installed by local distributors Sound Harmonics under the auspices of co-director Joseph Mandy.
“CRC required a world class sound system that would cover all of the church’s requirements, from their usual services, to youth services, church conventions such as the annual ’Dream Week’ and potential internal church productions of a theatrical nature,’ says Mandy. “The system coverage needs to be even throughout the venue and be able to produce a high SPL when required.’

Jean Kruger is sound and maintenance manager at the mother congregation in Bloemfontein and he had a big hand in the appointment of Sound Harmonics for the project.

On how they were introduced he says: “Gearhouse did a massive CC Winans tour and (at the time) we were looking to update our PA system in Bloemfontein. They stopped off in Bloem where Jaco de Witt set up the system and we were so impressed with how it sounded that I went looking for the supplier of L-Acoustics. Long story short, we installed a DV-DOSC system identical to what was used at the concert and we have been happy ever since. We also have international artists come through like Hillsong United, Israel Houghton, Planet Shakers and the Parachute Band. When they hear it is an L-Acoustics system they are usually happy to work on it.’

Resultantly, a multi-hang KARAi system was finally decided upon and installed for maximum coverage of the large 7 000-seater hall that includes a massive, semi-circular floor seating area and a sizeable balcony.

Both the main PA and the delay hangs consist of KARAi elements. KARAi is the installation version of the KARA touring system and includes the M-BUMP/M-BUMPiW rigging structures.

The main left and right hangs which cover the main downstairs section consist of nine KARAi cabinets a side with four SB18i subwoofers flown per side in a cardioid configuration. The system was set up with a four-way crossover. A further two SB28 dual-18’ subwoofers a side were ground stacked.

For the delay hangs, four arrays of four KARAi cabinets were positioned to cover the balcony area. As Richard Smith, co-director at Sound Harmonics says: “This allows for fantastic stereo imaging upstairs.’

For additional fill, a variety of constant curvature and coaxial L-Acoustics loudspeakers were placed throughout the auditorium. Two arrays a side of dual ARCS Focus cabinets were flown vertically to cover the side raised seating area. A further six 8XTi coaxial enclosures were mounted into the front of the curved wall of the stage for coverage of the front rows.

Finally, four 12XT floor wedge monitors were supplied for Pastor At.

All amplifiers supplied to CRC Pretoria were L-Acoustics. A combination of LA8 and LA4 amplified controllers were installed and networked to allow L-Acoustic’s L-Net amplifier network to provide control and monitoring of the system via LA Network Manager software. The feeds to the amps are both analogue and digital on the AES/EBU protocol with analogue fallback redundancy should the digital inputs fail.
When asked how he felt about the end result of the installation Kruger says: “There are many good brands out there but L-Acoustics was the one that ticked all the boxes for us and the good support we receive from sound harmonics is the best part of it. Sound harmonics installed what they promised when they promised regardless of many challenges that they were faced with and we are very happy with the install and service we were given. It is a top quality installation and I am very happy with the products they supplied.’

Getting into the console side, a total of three DiGiCo consoles were supplied to the church through local distributors Tadco with the installation being overseen by Kyle Robson, operational support manager. FOH received an SD10 while monitor world and the broadcast suite each received an SD8. A single SD-Rack was supplied to act as the central input capture and distribution point with FOH retaining full redundancy while, all of the other consoles feed off of the auxiliary MADI ports. There were challenges, however.

“It’s great to see three consoles feeding off of one rack have independent control,’ says Robson. “However, a problem we faced was with the monitor outputs. The client needed 12 mixes but the consoles only offer eight on-board outputs. The solution was running the fifth BNC to FOH from the second MADI output on the SD8 monitor console into the second MADI input on the FOH console and using one of the new tools on the latest update, Copy Audio. We were able to route what was being sent to us from the monitor console directly to the outputs of the rack without having to bring them up on the FOH console surface. The SD-Rack has 32 analogue outputs which can be accessed by FOH and monitors.’

On the broadcast end, feeding the monitor and FOH consoles with live feeds from outside services was the goal. Robson achieved this by running a BNC out of the broadcast console MADI port into the second MADI input port on the monitor console. The feeds were then routed back out to FOH the in the same way he described in the monitor dilemma, the only difference being FOH would simply patch that feed onto their surface.

Lighting

Having been involved with the lighting installation the Bloemfontein branch it was only natural that the lighting system for CRC Pretoria was supplied and installed by Johannesburg lighting specialists DWR.

One of the main points of the brief given by Pastor At was to create a lighting system that could accommodate live events in the same league as Idols without bringing in any additional equipment.

“The first proposal we did was more of a wish list and from there we cut it down into a phased approach that Pastor At would work towards over the period of a few years,’ says Robert Izzett from DWR. “The initial phase was to put the needed infrastructure in: trussing, cabling, control and the minimum amount of lighting needed to broadcast their services. There was a big interest in LED and the majority of the lighting we supplied was LED. It’s interesting to note that when we started the project there were going to be 72 dimmers in the project but as the years past and technology improved it was reduced down to only 24 dimmers, with the rest substituted with LED sources.’

Three large trusses were custom-made by Prolyte to accommodate the phase one fixtures and for later upgrades. These included two massive concentric arches of H40V truss (90m in total) that follow the curvature of the seating below. Two further 20m trusses were suspended above the stage comprising H40V and S52V varieties.

In total, the following fixtures were installed:

• 24 x Robe Robin 1200 LED Wash

• 12 x Robe Robin Pointe

• 24 x Longman Hi-powered LED Cans (truss warmers)

• 24 x Selecon SPX Profiles

The entire system was designed to be “rental company friendly’; notes Izzett, with the inclusion of multiple DMX tie lines between each of the trusses, the stage and FOH. A custom patch rack was fabricated to facilitate outside customers who wish to plug in their own dimmers or hot power into the existing socapex network. This would instantly supply dimmers and power to each truss and stage point. Currently there are 48 x 15A circuits of hot power permanently installed in the venue.
A major concern for this installation was safety regarding the massive trusses and motors. According to Izzett: “The church did not have anyone on staff suitably qualified to take the job a rigger. So the decision was made to increase the safety factors on all trusses to 10:1. All motor points in the church are rated at 500kg per point, but we installed 1 000kg motors to increase the factor of safety to 10:1. What’s really nice is that at 500kg per point each truss can take quite a load.’
The lighting console supplied was a Grand MA2 Light along with the aforementioned 24-channel Strand wall rack dimmer, eight LSC DMX splitters and a Strand DMX Merge.

DWR also supplied the house lighting for the venue which is, interestingly, all wirelessly controlled. A GDS Arc system was employed which features 33 x 8 cells, 64 x 4 cells, 50 x MR16s and 25 x 1 cell, all at 2 700K colour temperature.
“The great thing about this system is it allowed the electricians (DC Electrical) to install all the fittings just as they would install conventional fittings without any complicated data lines. And we came in afterwards to configure the system wirelessly,’ says Izzett.

Like any large installation of this nature, the project was not without challenges, a main challenge being that DWR was relied upon to supply both design and implementation. To help ease the process local top lighting design professionals Joshua Cutts and Francois van der Merwe were brought in to handle the design side which enabled DWR to focus on the installation.

“We worked on the project for a number of years before the building finally got to the point where it was ready for us to come in and install and then we put under tight deadlines for completion,’ says Izzett. “We ended up doing a temporary installation for the church while we were waiting for some of the equipment to arrive, and then we re-installed everything into its final resting place.’

AV and LED

The audio visual system at CRC was supplied and installed by Adriaan Booyens of Aridian Consulting while the large central LED screen was installed by Pixel Displays, coordinated by Mike Theunissen.

In an unusual twist of events, Aridian came on board as a matter of happenstance and a keen sense of opportunity.

“Initially I was driving up the road here and saw the structure being built,’ says Booyens. “At first I thought it was a shopping centre but the next week I saw that it was a church. So I started investigating for contacts and eventually got hold of the main pastor, Pastor Russell. He said he wasn’t really involved in the technical side and that I should talk to Clinton at media. Clinton told me that they hadn’t brought anyone on board yet for projectors and video distribution, so at that point I got on board at site meetings and started supplying quotations.’

In total, the following equipment was installed by Aridian:

• AMX DGX 16×16 chassis with HDMI input and output cards

• AMX NI3100 central controller

• AMX Precis DSP

• Celerity fibre optic to HDMI cables

• 2 x SONY VP500FHL 7000 ANSI Lumens projectors

• 3 x Samsung 23′ computer monitors

• 6 x Sony 55′ TV screens

• 1 x Harman Kardon Sound Bar

• 2 x Stewart Audio plenum-rated amplifiers

• SpeakerCraft ceiling speakers

The screens selected by CRC and installed by Aridian were two Screen International Flatmax 600 x 337cm screens with a 1.0 gain and micro-holed fabric, supplied by Electrosonic and installed on the walls flanking the stage. The micro-holed fabric makes the screens acoustically transparent which allows for speakers to be mounted behind the screens if need be.

The projectors installed were both Sony and included two VP500FHL 7000 ANSI lumen models.

Video distribution is handled by AMX control equipment. Booyens explains: “Two signals get fed from the broadcast rack via HDMI to an AMX DGX 16x 16 Matrix switcher. We then distribute video to the various monitors and TVs using fibre optic cables. The first signal is a local mix and the other is a broadcast link from Bloemfontein CRC. The broadcast link gets displayed on one of the reference monitors on stage and on a TV in front of stage. This is to provide the preaching Pastor with a live link to see what is happening in Bloemfontein. The other feed is sent to the mother’s rooms and another two monitors on stage. We used Stewart Audio plenum-rated amps for the sound in the mother’s rooms as well as SpeakerCraft speakers. The two projectors are fed directly from broadcast with HDSDI and they project onto the Screen International screens.’

Interestingly, Aridian custom fabricated the three playback monitor enclosures on stage to look, to the untrained eye, almost identical to the L-Acoustics wedges. This makes them blend in nicely with the rest of the on-stage kit.

When asked about challenges during the installation Booyens says: “Firstly we could not use scaffolding to install the projectors; the roof is too high. We had to make use of a professional rigger to hang from a rope from the trussing to get to the projectors for installation and alignment. Access into the ceilings was very hard as it is all flush plastered ceilings with very limited man holes. This led to many fibre cables being broken.’

The LED screens installed were all Pixel Displays’ own Pixel PH6mm SMD Indoor and totalled 112 cabinets 6mm cabinets (576 x 576mm) in a 14 x 8 configuration. The total area of the resulting LED wall is 8064 x 4608mm with a true pixel resolution of 1344 x 768.

A LVP 603S processor was installed to control the screen and is based on a Linsn system for sending the feed. An HD SDI signal is sent from the controller with a backup HDMI feed coming from the AMX controller.

On the challenges faced when installing the LED wall Theunissen says: “It was a pretty much a one-night installation so once we actually started building the screen it took about nine hours. The main challenge was getting everything safe and secure. Robert (Izzett) and the other guys from DWR got heavily involved in the rigging and stress points in the roof so that helped us a lot. ‘

“The church has installed state of the art equipment and we are extremely proud to be associated with CRC and the rollout into their other branches,’ adds Theunissen.

The wrap

What more can be said? A lot of work and tech went into CRC Pretoria. In fact, there’s more to report on that we just don’t have space for. But what is clear is that only the best was good enough for CRC and very little compromises were made. If you ever have the pleasure of visiting the church you’ll get a great idea of exactly what South African technical supply and installation companies are capable of and I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion we did: excellence.