Dominican Republic – The new home of Ministerio Internacional Monte de Dios in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the largest Christian church in the Caribbean, is equipped with a sound reinforcement system developed by Wholestage that is headed by L-Acoustics K2 line arrays and KS28 subwoofers.
The worship space rises from a 45,000-square-meter campus in Santo Domingo Norte, its semicircular auditorium built to seat nearly 8,000 worshipers around a central stage. Led by pastors Dr. Miguel and Montserrat Bogaert, the ministry had steadily outgrown one home after another, and its leaders were determined that the new building be matched by sound worthy of its scale.
Church management set a benchmark of no more than 3 dB of level variation between any two seats in the house, an exacting target for even coverage across a nearly 180-degree audience. Speech intelligibility was the first priority, but the music had to carry equal weight.
“Monte de Dios has a very dynamic service. The band stays on stage the whole time, and there is a lot of energy, not necessarily loud, but very dynamic,” says Jonathan Del Villar, CTO and managing partner at Wholestage, an L-Acoustics Certified Provider Distributor (CPd) for the Dominican Republic. “The low end is an especially important element. They wanted their members and visitors to feel the band and the drums.”
Miguel Bogaert Jr., son of the founding pastor and closely involved in the church’s technology decisions, is a longtime follower of L-Acoustics. “The church intentionally wanted to create a worship space that provided a high-fidelity experience,” notes Del Villar. Wholestage designed the system and brought in locally-based integrator SoundVideoLight (SVL), which has 15 years of audio-visual experience in the region, to handle the installation alongside the church’s lighting, rigging, and show-control infrastructure.”
“Church leadership “really did its homework,” Del Villar states, studying how comparable congregations across the region had solved the same problem, among them pastor Carlos Enrique “Cash” Luna’s 12,000-seat Casa de Dios in Guatemala City. “Sound is one of the most important elements of the worship experience, and the pastors were aware of that from the start,” he says. “Their standards were high because they are in tune with what other successful churches around the region are doing.”
Wholestage designed the church sound system around K2, modeling coverage in Soundvision to confirm even level and intelligibility across the full arc before a single enclosure was flown. L-Acoustics supported the design at every stage.
“We had strong support from L-Acoustics throughout the entire project. Josh Maichele, global application lead for House of Worship, was heavily involved, especially during the design stage,” Del Villar says. It was Maichele who proposed a flown end-fire and cardioid configuration for the KS28 subwoofers. “It is an almost 180-degree seating area, so this was a very effective way to ensure there were no low-end cancellations anywhere in the auditorium,” he explains.
Final calibration was carried out with L-Acoustics M1 and P1 against the Soundvision predictions, with company application engineer Alex Soto on-site alongside the Wholestage and SVL teams, the latter being led by SVL operations and project manager Pedro Abreu.
The main system comprises 48 K2 flown as four arrays of 12, paired with a central cluster of 16 KS28 subwoofers in two hangs of eight, set in the combined end-fire and cardioid arrangement. Eight X8 provide front fill and hangs of one A15i Focus over two A15i Wide per side deliver side-fill, while two X12, one per side, serve as delays. Onstage, four X15 HiQ act as monitors. The K2 mains are granularly driven by 192 channels of LA7.16i amplified controller power, for paramount consistency over the audience, and the KS28 subwoofers are powered by a dozen LA12X amplified controllers. Del Villar also specified three DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles for front-of-house, monitor, and broadcast mixes.
The result is a room where the 3 dB target holds from the first row to the last, and where the low end is felt as clearly as it is heard. “They wanted their members and visitors to feel the band, the drums, and with this system, they really do,” Del Villar concludes.
