RiverLife Church Singapore - Nexo Geo M10 Installation

RiverLife Church Singapore was established in 1991 as a central gathering point to worshippers residing in eastern Singapore. The church was previously known as Bartley Christian Church (Pasir Ris Centre) before being officially renamed as an independent body in 2000. Despite its small beginnings, RiverLife Church and its followers are dedicated to providing support to various special need communities locally and overseas. Currently, RiverLife Church serves about 3000 devoted worshippers weekly across 11 full services over the weekends.

Situated at level 3 of the premise, the RiverLife Church Worship Centre is a significant worship venue where it houses around 1200 audiences during a service. The services would comprise of speeches, videos and also a full live band; hence RiverLife requires its speakers' system to have high fidelity to represent each service elements indeed competently. With its recent upgrade of the sound mixing console to the Yamaha RIVAGE PM10, a state of the art sound console that provides Rupert Neve preamplifiers to its user, the installation of a new speaker system was a timely upgrade for the church.

In this installation project, the design objective of the system was to provide even coverage for the audience space with a focus on the front of house mixing position. This hybrid approach ensures that the sonic performance of the speaker sound will be consistent throughout the space as well as having an optimize hotspot at the front house position to allow the engineers to feel and work with the system effortlessly. Regarding hardware, the system will include a pair of Nexo Geo M10 Line Array, 4 Nexo LS18 subwoofer and 2 Nexo ID24 speakers as front field. These selections of speakers will be able to yield about 102dB of Sound Pressure Level (SPL) at the hotspot with a linear decay of 1.2dB per meter using the Nexo NS-1 System Configuration Software.

As compared to the previous system where multiple delay cabinets were require to ensure that the audiences are getting sufficient intelligibility and SPL, the Nexo Geo M10 system does not require any delay units due to its efficient design in propagating sound through space. For the array cluster in this project, 7 units of Nexo Geo M1012 (12-degree vertical dispersion) and 1 unit of Nexo Geo M1025 (25-degree vertical dispersion) were used. The 12-degree vertical dispersion units were responsible in delivering sound till the back of house, covering about 6 meters per cabinets and the 25-degree vertical dispersion cabinet was used to manage the downfield application as it has a wider vertical dispersion.

Understanding the needs of the end user is fundamentally important, and it also plays a critical role in the design of the speaker system. As sound characteristic of speaker systems can be subjective at times, quantitative pre and post measurements were executed to ensure that the requirements from the users were answered and there was practical improvement from the previous system. One of the topics was the low-frequency performance from the system as the end user has expressed their liking towards a system that has more “warmth” and prominent sounding bass. Alignment and contouring were done to help fulfill this aspect and through the comparison between measurements, there is a 40% improvement of low-frequency performance concerning bass ratio.

Furthermore, to ensure that the system is balanced and does not overly emphasize the low frequencies, additional comparison measurements were performed. For instance, the comparison of the Early to Late Energy Ratio was made to ensure that the clarity aspect of the system is taken of. Evaluated results show that in the application of speech and music, the Nexo Geo M10 system is able to provide an additional 3dB loudness of clarity as compared to the previous system. This would allow the users to mix at 3dB softer to achieve the same level of clarity from the past system. The newly installed Nexo Geo M10 system has provided pragmatic results to its user where the sonic applications in a house of worship scenarios are answered. With the complement of the Yamaha RIVAGE PM10 mixing console, RiverLife Church Singapore has expanded its audio arsenal holistically to ensure that every aspect of audio, from input signals to output delivery are all taken care of.

Pasir Ris, Singapore