‘Mega church’ praises Lake LM 26

The Living Hope Church’s new permanent facility in Piperton, Tennessee, has chosen Lake’s LM 26 processor to control the church’s FOH mains.

With a rapidly growing congregation, Memphis-based designer/integrator, Elite Multimedia set out to provide a highly flexible audio system for Living Hope, eventually deciding on Lake’s LM 26 processor based on the range of control it is designed to offer over equalisation, limiting and delay.

“There’s a substantial difference in the quality of this system compared to the one they used when they operated as a portable church,” explained Wade Russell, lead systems integrator at Elite. “One of the main reasons we selected the Lake LM 26 was the fact that it did 96k AES. We’re running AES from a Midas PRO2C console to the LM 26 and the amps, and integrating the Midas and Lake processing was key to creating a very dynamic system that was powerful and had the depth and stereo imaging they were looking for. The variety of customisable filters within the Lake LM 26 definitely helped us achieve that.”

The response from both congregants and other engineers has also been positive. “When we made the decision to move into a building of our own, we approached everything with our sound system by saying ‘let’s go ahead and put the best gear in and make a big impact’ and Lake was simply the best,” said Living Hope’s audio technician, Tim Johnson. “Not only does it provide a great signal path, but with the built in filtering we were able to get the sound image we were looking for so wherever people sit they have the same experience. People who don’t know a lot about audio know that they love what they hear, and people who do can’t get over the how crystal clear the sound is. You’re hearing true, clean signal at 96k and the detail of every instrument. Literally, you feel like you’re up on stage with the musicians.”

Both Johnson and Living Hope’s worship pastor, David Lewis, come from ‘mega church’ backgrounds, and both were looking to bring the same level of sound quality to this smaller venue. “But in actuality,” Johnson added, “with the Lake LM 26, this far surpasses the quality we had in those larger churches.”

However, he was soon made aware of one potential issue. “After we listened to the system, David said, ‘I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. My band is really going to have to practice hard because if we don’t sound good, we certainly can’t blame it on the system.’”

Elite Multimedia is a faith-based A/V firm that specialises in the provision of audio, video and lighting solutions for a broad range of house of worship, concert and special event applications throughout the Southeastern United States.

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