When a church looks at technology,
it doesn’t necessarily stop being a house of worship but it does begin to take
on the coolly analytic characteristics of any business looking to make a major
capital acquisition. As objective as those per lustrations may be, they are
nonetheless vulnerable to perceptual biases that can color the process. And
that’s what lies behind Kevin Knox’s initial assessment of a Bose Room Match PA
system that was under consideration at the Church of Apostles, an evangelical
mega church in Atlanta’s Buck head neighborhood, where Knox is the media and
communications coordinator. “I remember thinking, ‘Bose-they make great
headphones for when you’re on an airplane but you’re not putting them in my
sanctuary,’” Knox recalls. “I just didn’t associate the Bose brand with
professional products.
”
That’s an issue the Boston-area
company has faced since it entered the professional audio sphere in the 1990s.
It’s L1 portable PA system, introduced in 2003, achieved a relatively small but
avid following among touring musicians, in large part for its seeming
impervious feedback problems.
The Room Match, which was introduced
in 2011, took Bose to another level, putting up against the more familiar brand
names in large-scale house sound systems. The product, which is actually a
series of modules with highly specific dispersion patterns that lets
sound-system singers couple together combinations that are very
specifically tailored to each space’s scale and nuance, has been making steady
inroads in houses of worship and elsewhere, tough it’s ironically still dogged
by Bose’s more well-known success with compact home stereo system, interesting
and expensive desktop radios and the noise-cancelling headphones that initially
came to Knox’s mind when he first encountered the Room Match system at a WFX
event in 2012.
Then, he heard the system. “It had a
real warmth that you don’t usually get with a big PA system,” he says. “It felt
like it was right there in the room with you. I got the sense that it would be
able to give us what we really needed: good intelligibility in the mid-range
and full-range sound for music.”
Knox and some his colleagues at the
church – he has a 14-person tech team comprised of local AV professionals of
various specialties, who are paid staffers – listened to the Room Match system
in a variety of environments, including some nightclubs. His acceptance of the Room
Match, intended to replace an aging EAW point-source system in the church’s 12
year old 2,450-seat sanctuary, was more a process than an epiphany, and he
found some of his initial reservations shared even by the AV integrator they
chose to help design and install the new sound system, Nashville, TN based CTS.
“They were pretty cautious about it at first, too, like everyone else was,”
Knox says of CTS, which was brought on board the project after the church
decided in favor of the Room Match system.
Looking for a Bose Room Match
Solution for your organization, contact MCC’s Audio Visual Solutions Division
today to learn more!
For more details please contact us at:
Memphis Communications Corporation
4771 Summer Ave
Memphis, TN 38122
Tel: 901.725.9271
Fax: 901.272.3577
Toll Free: 866.805.5893
Service and Supplies: 901.257.2500
Website: http://www.memphiscommunications.net
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