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Tongyeong Juklim church celebrates with KV2

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Tongyeong is a bustling port city of 140,000 located at the southern edge of the Goseong peninsula in South Korea. Famous for its beautiful marine surroundings, its many islands and waterways, its lively port town atmosphere and its famous seafood, the city is surrounded on three sides by the sea. Tongyeong is also a designated UNESCO City of Music, known for its International Music Festival which is considered one of the most influential and respected contemporary music festivals in Asia.

As a city where the ancient and the modern collide, there is a thriving church tradition that embraces both ends of the spectrum. Seoul-based pro audio specialists and KV2 distributor, DaonSD, were recently tasked with designing an audio system for the new build Tongyeong Juklim church. Naturally, they opted for a front-to-back KV2 system.

DaonSD’s project manager, John Parks explains that the Tongyeong Juklim church is a relatively young insititution, having been founded in 1990. As the church’s numbers swelled, a new, modern campus was designed. Initially it was planned with a different audio system, but the decision to switch to KV2 was unanimous after DaonSD's demonstration at the recommendation of a local agency.

“As the main hall – which seats around 400 people – is less than 25m front to back, and there is no balcony to contend with, there was absolutely no need for a line array system which would have been cumbersome and expensive,” says Mr. Parks. “We recommended a classic ES system comprising a single ES1.0 combined with an ES2.5 high output subwoofer per side, driven by a pair of EPAK2500R control and amplification units. By aligning the mid-high frequencies toward the rear of the congregation, the main speaker delivers natural and warm speech reinforcement throughout space without the need for a separate downfill or frontfill speaker.”

Nevertheless, in order to achieve that, DaonSD had some acoustical advice: “We recommended that the reverberation time was kept to near one second and that special attention be paid to the speech band frequencies to ensure that the church leader’s speech and the choir could be discerned with clarity. The interior construction team were happy to accept the advice and were able to minimise any potential acoustic issues with careful choice of materials and skilful contruction techniques.”

Another potential issue was the large LED screen behind the pulpit: “Many churches in Korea are choosing to augment their worship experience with large LED screens, and Tongyeoung Juklim church is no exception,” explains Mr. Parks. “However, these large, highly reflective surfaces can often play havoc with gain before feedback. Fortunately, it wasn’t a problem here as the sound from the KV2 system is so beautifully detailed that we never have a problem achieving the gain required for the services to sound fantastic.”

Finally, DaonSD also supplied a pair of KV2’s most bijou loudspeakers, the ultra-compact ESD Cube, which sit on the beautiful crystal lectern on the stage below the LED screen. Supplied in white to blend seamlessly with the environment, the Cubes act as monitors for the service leader.

“This place, which has been quiet for the last two years due to the Covid pandemic, is slowly reviving,” observes Mr. Parks. “We hope, that with their new system, beautiful sound will once again bloom in Tongyeong, the city of music.”