Martin Audio makes the right waves in charismatic Ghanian church

A newly constructed 4,400-seat, three-storey church in the Ghanaian capital of Accra has been installed with Martin Audio’s Wavefront Precision line array system. With a global outreach overseen by founder, Rev. Dr. Mensa Otabil, the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) commissioned Eben Awuah of Amson Audio to conduct audio consultancy and installation works.

Having been associated with the Dominion Centre in London’s Wood Green, the Ghanaian production engineer and integrator Awuah has been working with professional audio systems since the age of 13. “The time came to set up my own AV operation and serve the whole of West Africa, including Nigeria and the Ivory Coast,” commented Awuah. “I needed to go back there with a recognised system and Martin Audio was one of the premier brands I was looking at.”

The turning point came during a Martin Audio open day he attended in 2019 during a demonstration of the scalable Wavefront Precision Compact optimised array. “It coincided with the completion of an installation in Nigeria with another leading system,” he furthered. “Although that sounded great, what I heard from WPC gave me the headroom I needed for this project.”

This was very much foremost in his mind when he was brought in as a consultant by the ICGC for its new project, described as a “Pentecostal Charismatic church”. “We earmarked four major systems and I was asked to give the pros and cons of each and explain which would be the better choice for the church.” Eben Awuah was then asked to undertake the complete installation.

Knowing the system would need to reinforce a vast programme of music – from gospel voice choirs to full orchestras rock ‘n’ roll bands and spoken word from celebrants, he recommended a WPC solution. “We are the only church in Ghana, with an opera group, a classical band, a harmonised choir and rock ‘n’ roll band,” laughed Awuah. “WPC not only gave us more warmth than the other systems, but we needed a stronger lower end that we just couldn’t find elsewhere. It gave us that little bit of extra headroom with all the drivers hitting the right frequencies within the box. As for speech reproduction, the clarity from WPC is second to none.”

Ensuring maximum control, consistency and coverage, the entire system is run in one-box resolution and comprises of two hangs each comprising 10 WPC elements and two hangs of eight. These are used in combination with hangs of six SXCF118 18-inch cardioid subwoofers flown behind each hang. There is further ground stacked sub reinforcement of 12 SXH218 dual 18-inch subwoofers set across the wide stage in blocks of 2-4-4-2. The line arrays are powered by 10 iKON iK81’s and the subs by five iK42. Cardioid characteristics for the subwoofers were deemed to be essential owing to the large number of microphones deployed on stage, especially with orchestral performances.

Powered by four iKON iK42 amplifiers, 12 CDD8 are deployed as stage lip fills together with 12 XE300s serving as floor monitors. The vast number of support function rooms and ancillary areas in the vast building also have their sound delivered by more than 140 Martin Audio C6.8T ceiling speakers. System design assistance was provided by Martin Audio product support engineer, Robin Dibble. “We just loaded the system files from Display 2.3 via VU-NET and with the minimum of tweaking it was ready to go. This system just works, even though there is still more work to do on the room.”

The installation has certainly met with the approval of ICGC founder /overseer and pastor, Dr. Otabil, who predicted that “this must be the best sound system in the whole of West Africa”.

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