Student Mobilization Conference 2017

DAS Audio Delivers the Message Loud and Clear at the Student Mobilization Conference 2017.

Held in downtown Oklahoma City at the Cox Convention Center Arena, the Student Mobilization Conference (SMC) 2017 was a 4-day program designed to build spiritual leaders for Christ from among the area’s college campuses. This year’s program featured some Congregational Leaders like Craig Groeschel, Bryan Loritt, and Sam Hannon. To ensure everyone in attendance could hear the presentations clearly, a sound reinforcement system consisting of loudspeakers from the Event and Action Series catalogs of Valencia, Spain-based DAS Audio was utilized.

Relevant Audio + Visual of Wichita, KS, which handles live event production, equipment rental and sales, as well as being an AV design / build firm, was contracted to provide sound reinforcement services for the event. Chris Derstein, the company’s CEO / Operations Manager, also served as the head production manager for this year’s conference. His company deployed a combination of DAS Event-210A powered array elements, Event-218A powered subwoofers, Action-M12A powered stage monitors, and Action-8A powered point source enclosures. He discussed the project with the DAS Audio equipment.

“The Cox Convention Center Arena is home to the Oklahoma City Blue of the NBA’s Development League, so it’s a pretty sizeable space that is frequently used for a variety of other programs, including graduation ceremonies and similar community events.  For SMC 2017, there were over 3,400 college students in attendance, the largest SMC conference gathering ever. With that many people, it was critically important to provide a sound system with a high level of speech intelligibility in addition to solid music reproduction capabilities. This is precisely why we deployed the DAS Audio Event and Action Series loudspeakers.”

The sound system setup Derstein and his team created utilized 24 Event-210A line array elements—flown 12 enclosures on each side of the stage area for the left-right hangs. For low frequency support, the crew utilized 8 Event-218A subwoofers. These enclosures were positioned on the ground—4 elements per side aligned with the flown clusters above. For stage monitoring, the team placed 6 DAS Action-M12A’s for monitor wedges and, for front fill, they deployed 4 Action-8A loudspeakers, evenly distributed across the front of the stage.

About characteristics that made the DAS Audio equipment the ideal choice for this project, Derstein comments. “First and foremost is audio performance and in this area, the DAS equipment excels. The Event-210A is an incredibly smooth sounding array across the entire dynamic range and they provide a ton of headroom. These traits, combined with the impressive horizontal and vertical dispersion characteristics, enabled us to provide even coverage with clear, natural sounding audio throughout the audience area.”