Martin Audio WPC and WPM
Q: What is Martin Audio USA’s perception of the worship market and what percentage does it represent of overall sales in the U.S.?
A: With over 400,000 churches and about 10% a year looking at some level of audio upgrade a year, the opportunity for Martin Audio is significant and it’s playing an increasing part [in] our revenue as a result.
Q. Does the company have a specific philosophy when it comes to this market?
A: Our philosophy to the HOW market is similar to our overall proposition. It’s about the desire for audio to unite a congregation with intelligible speech and music that envelops the audience, front to back, in spite of any challenges of highly reverberant spaces that many houses of worship tend to occupy. Equally, with everything from traditional services to Gospel to full-on rock performances, we offer a range of solutions and price points to meet the diverse needs of this sector.
Q: What Martin Audio products are particularly appropriate for house of worship installations, and why?
A: For the last number of years our MLA (Multicellular Loudspeaker Array) series has provided superlative optimized coverage, control and consistency for mid-sized and large venues. In the last 12 months, our new Wavefront Precision series has offered a scalable approach to line array optimization, allowing venues a more flexible solution that can be tailored to the venue needs and importantly budget considerations, too. With the addition of scalable resolution to O-Line, the same level of flexibility is now also available for this micro line array, perfect for speech and background music-based services.
For smaller venues or as “fill” for larger systems, both CDD (passive) and CDD-LIVE (powered) have been highly proficient in this space. Combining the “point-source” benefits of coaxial designs with the consistent coverage of differential dispersion technology provides wide, consistent coverage to every member of the congregation, frequently requiring fewer speakers than traditional two-way systems.
Q: Are there any new Martin Audio products applicable to house of worship?
A: An exciting development is our 3D audio Sound Adventure solution, featuring the SARA II processing engine. One of the benefits of this is the ability to create a wider stereo image. Traditional sound reinforcement with left/right audio will mean [that] large proportions of the audience ... do not enjoy the benefit of true stereo image. With several sources distributed across the front of stage, the SARA II engine can adjust the output from each source to provide more of the audience with stereo image.
Find house of worship case studies here: https://martin-audio.com/case-studies
