Maranatha Community Church Debuts Africa’s First L-ISA Venue

Church Auditorium Installation Sets New Benchmark For Immersive Sound

Maranatha Community Church has opened a new 5,500-seat campus in the Riverfields precinct of Kempton Park, north east of Johannesburg, equipped with Africa’s first permanent L-Acoustics L-ISA immersive sound system. Designed and supplied by DWR Distribution, L-Acoustics Certified Provider Distributor for South Africa, the installation is built entirely around the L-Acoustics A Series and is intended to deliver hyperreal audio coverage across the full auditorium, including the balcony.

The new venue nearly doubles the capacity of the church’s previous 3,000-seat home and adds a balcony with an additional seating area beneath it. Project consultant Robert Grobler, a South African lighting designer and long-time member of the church, led the audio installation together with DWR, which has been a technical partner to Maranatha Community Church for many years.

Soundvision Modelling And Demonstration Validate System Choice

According to Grobler, the project began without a fixed technical brief, beyond the requirement for a powerful system that could handle energetic worship. Initial concepts focused on covering the room effectively, with more conventional stereo designs on the table before L-ISA was considered.

Over nearly two years, DWR developed three or four audio and lighting concepts for the church, modelling each proposal in L-Acoustics Soundvision software. This included an L-ISA configuration, which requires specific room criteria to achieve optimal performance. Richard Smith of DWR notes that the team fully modelled an L-ISA layout in the auditorium before presenting it to the church leadership.

The decision to adopt immersive sound was ultimately made after a live demonstration. DWR accompanied Maranatha Community Church pastors to a Jonathan Roxmouth concert at Montecasino, where Multi-Media had deployed an L-ISA system. Hearing the technology in a real performance environment convinced the church to proceed with L-ISA.

Pastor Mark Bradshaw, who oversees music and training at the church, compares the experience to traditional stereo: with conventional left-right arrays, worshippers hear what he describes as a generic wall of sound. With L-ISA, instruments and vocals are localized to where they appear on stage, creating a clearer and more natural soundstage that aligns what the congregation sees with what they hear.

A Series System Design Delivers Immersive Coverage

For a venue of this size, a large stereo line array would normally be expected. Instead, the design team leveraged L-ISA’s object-based approach, in which individual sources are distributed across multiple arrays rather than summed into a single left-right pair. This reduces the workload on any one array and enables the use of more compact A Series loudspeakers without compromising coverage or impact.

Smith explains that this approach allowed the project to avoid a larger K Series system and instead specify A15 loudspeakers, resulting in an overall investment comparable to a conventional high-quality stereo system but with significantly greater spatial control and capability. Pastor Bradshaw notes that he initially assumed immersive technology would be beyond the church’s budget but found that the final solution remained within financial reach.

Scene System, Subwoofer Configuration And Balcony Coverage

The core L-ISA Scene System at Maranatha Community Church comprises five arrays of A15i loudspeakers, each array using six A15i Focus cabinets to build the primary immersive panorama. This scene is widened with an Extension made up of two additional arrays, each also rigged with six A15i Focus.

Low-frequency reinforcement is provided by eight KS28 subwoofers, flown centrally above the stage in a cardioid configuration to improve directivity and reduce unwanted low-frequency energy on stage. Each channel from the mixing console is routed directly to an L-ISA Processor II, which generates discrete signals for each array to achieve precise localization of instruments and voices within the soundfield.

Outside the main immersive zone, coverage is typically handled by mono downmixes feeding front fills, out-fills and delay loudspeakers. At Maranatha Community Church, these areas are served by two A15i out-fill arrays, each combining two A15i Focus with one A15i Wide, along with two A10i Focus as delays and 10 compact 5XT loudspeakers for mono front-fill across the stage lip.

The section beneath the balcony is treated differently. Here, 20 X6i loudspeakers are configured as L-ISA Spatial fills, enabling listeners in this otherwise challenging area to experience the same immersive image as the main seating area rather than a simplified downmix.

Amplification And Processing Infrastructure

The loudspeaker system is powered by a combination of L-Acoustics amplifiers: two LA12X units, six LA7.16i units and one LA4X. By deploying the high-density LA7.16i, DWR was able to dedicate one amplifier channel per loudspeaker, providing extensive control and processing flexibility across the installation.

Engineering Collaboration And Precise Deployment

L-Acoustics Application Engineer Adriaan van der Walt worked alongside Smith on the system design, completing the specification approximately a year before the campus opened. Van der Walt later returned to site to calibrate the system and oversee handover to the church’s technical team. DWR’s Jaco Beukes and Kyle Freemantle were part of the on-site installation crew.

Freemantle highlights the complexity of configuring the L-ISA Controller, where routing and positional data must be accurately defined to maintain a coherent immersive field. Achieving precise rigging angles and loudspeaker positions also required meticulous effort but was described by the team as a rewarding process.

Van der Walt credits the detailed information flow from initial Soundvision design through to on-site verification, emphasizing the care taken to match the modelled system with physical reality in the auditorium.

Impact On Worship Experience And Future Potential

For the church’s worship team, the move to immersive audio has had an immediate impact on how performances are perceived. Bradshaw notes that every musician and vocalist in the ensemble now has sonic space to be heard clearly, rather than competing within a dense stereo mix. Feedback from congregants has also highlighted the clarity of the new system, with attendees commenting on how intelligible and comfortable the sound is during services.

Van der Walt sees the installation as a starting point for the venue’s technical crew. While L-ISA is new to the team, training and experience are expected to unlock further creative applications of the system, potentially extending beyond worship services to other events hosted in the auditorium.

With this project, Maranatha Community Church and DWR Distribution have not only delivered a significant upgrade in capacity and audio quality for the congregation but also established a reference for immersive sound in houses of worship and live event venues across the African continent.