Gateway Church broke ground for its first church campus on May 19, 2002. The campus included a 700-seat sanctuary that was designed to be expandable to 1,400 seats when there was a need for more room. The church never dreamed that the need would come as soon as 2004 when the average weekly attendance rose to 4,900.

Because the church had planned for growth, the facility’s design allowed for church activities to continue while the addition to the worship center was being completed. The outside of the building didn’t change at all. The existing worship center occupied only half of the building, so a mirror image of the worship center was built on the other said of the worship center’s wall. When it was completed, the wall was simply removed, and the two areas were joined. The stage area, which had been in the corner of the original worship center, was mirrored to create a large center stage that allowed for seating to surround it in nearly a 180-degree pattern.

AD was asked to come aboard the project to handle the inherent acoustic and audio problems that would naturally occur from doubling the worship center’s size, which created an extremely wide room that was not very deep. The church had already been experiencing challenges in their old worship space with noise and vibration from the HVAC systems. In addition, there were acoustic challenges with the back wall and some concerns about their sound system’s performance.

Gateway Church has a very contemporary worship style that includes a ten-person band, ten-person praise group and 50-member choir. The need to support both music and spoken word led the design team to consider a multi-channel sound system. The wide wrap of the seating ruled out most options, and an alternating left-right system was designed. This allowed for great musicality and intelligibility of the spoken word. Small format line arrays were chosen for their sonic characteristic and wide coverage pattern. The main speaker system consists of six arrays of five cabinets each. This system is supported by delay speakers at the rear of the room and stage-lip and subwoofers under the platform.

The church re-used their existing front of house console but immediately outgrew their platform monitoring capabilities. AD worked with the church to determined that a large format digital console was necessary to handle the needs of the wireless in-ear monitor systems that supported the praise team.

The acoustics of the room played a large role in getting the most out of the sound system. The most obvious treatments are to the rear and side walls where acoustical panels absorb and re-direct sound so reflections are not heard within the room. Additional recommendations helped provide control on the platform and reduce the level of noise intrusion from the HVAC systems.