The musicians on the worship team at Florida Hospital Church (FHC) now have a new in-ear monitoring system, making the Orlando house of worship one of the first North American locations of its kind to install a KLANG:fabrik 3D IEM solution for its praise band.
The addition of the KLANG system sold by AVnew, a local AVL consultant and integrator primarily dedicated to the HOW market, came together when the Seventh-day Adventist church’s band members expressed their interest to move to a wireless monitoring platform. [related]
Along with adding some Shure PSM 300s, “it’s the ultimate solution to achieve the freedom of being on a wireless IEM system combined with a very intuitive user interface and uniquely immersive 3D environment,” says AVnew’s Gil Parente, who first heard about KLANG at an InfoComm show a few years ago.
For FHC technical director Chad Hess, the KLANG system offered clear advantages.
“The way that you can spatially move instruments around the sound field is very nice,” he says. “In a mono in-ear mix where everything’s on top of each other, it’s hard to pick out your own instrument, and a stereo mix is really only marginally better.
Inside the Florida Hospital Church Project
“With the amount of separation that you can achieve in the KLANG, each instrument has its own clear identity in a 360-degree audio field. And it’s so simple for band members to be able to just drag where they want their sound to be with a finger on their personal tablets,” says Hess.
Those tablets, in this case, happen to be a set of Amazon Fire devices
“With other in-ear systems requiring a touchscreen, the only option is an iPad,” says Parente. “Because KLANG is fully functional and compatible with even $50 tablets, it actually makes the cost per mix very competitive with other personal mixing stations.”
Another thing that Hess appreciates is the system’s ability to protect musicians’ hearing when volume level increases occasionally run rampant.
“One of the problems that we previously used to experience was band members turning one thing up, then another, and then another until they couldn’t hear anything clearly because everything’s at max and it just sounds terrible,” he says with a laugh. “With the KLANG, if you boost an input all the way and then hit it again, it automatically lowers every other input by that amount, which is very simple yet effective solution. It’s little details like that that make this such a great tool.”
Despite the high-tech nature of the system, Hess notes that the setup was remarkably painless.
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“It was one of the easiest and smoothest installs that we’ve done, which surprised me,” he says. “Once we got everything patched over—the KLANG system, the wireless in-ear system, and the tablets—it all just worked on the first try.”
With two FHC services held each Sabbath—plus another church denomination renting the space and system for its own services on Sundays—worship music styles and performers in the 530-seat room vary widely from week to week, but everyone using the system is reportedly very pleased.
“The musicians love being wireless and really like the wider feel,” Hess adds. “They’d have to work awfully hard to make a mono mix on this thing; it very intuitively pushes them to make a wider and better mix. And the better the musicians can hear themselves, the better they can play, so the music is better, which makes for a better overall worship experience for everyone.”
KLANG in-ear monitoring products were used at the Florida Hospital Church
