Toronto, Canada (July 24, 2026)—Church on the Queensway is not a small parish. Able to seat 3,000 people at a time, worshipers come from near and far to experience the its message. Until recently, however, that meant hearing an aged, inconsistent point-source system that wasn’t up to the task. Turning to full-service audiovisual provider Soundbox, the church has updated its audio, and installed a d&b audiotechnik SL-Series XSL line array system supplemented by KSLi-SUB subwoofers and Y-Series and 10S-D Series point source enclosures.
“Our old system was point source; it needed to throw audio over 100 feet to reach the entire room and balcony, which resulted in inconsistent coverage and poor intelligibility in some areas,” said René Barrow, Queensway’s Technical & Media Director. “We found ourselves blasting the people in the front to reach those in the balcony. This wasn’t ideal. Add to that, intelligibility declined in the mid to upper areas of the of the balcony, which was particularly troubling with speaking events.”
After Barrow first heard a d&b rig at a 2022 PLASA trade show in England, he contacted Soundbox, a long-time partner of Church on the Queensway. Gerben Vanden Heuvel, Soundbox’s senior sales and designer for installs; following a P.A. shootout, they went with the XSL system, which they felt sounded better. “The boxes were lighter, the hang wouldn’t impede screen viewing, and it allowed for easy remote monitoring via their R1 software,” Barrow added. “d&b ticked all the right boxes and that was the game changer for me.”
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The new P.A. consists of four XSLi12 and a dozen XSLi8 flown as left/right line arrays; eight boxes per side, with four KSLi-SUB subwoofers arranged as a center cluster, and a Yi10P point source loudspeaker, placed as a center fill beneath the subwoofers. An additional two Yi10P are utilized as left and right balcony side fills and a pair of 10S-D point source loudspeakers are installed as balcony delays. The entire system is powered with a dozen 40D amplifiers with ArrayProcessing.
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“No matter where they are in the room, everyone loves the way it sounds,” shared Barrow. “Even all the way up in the back of the balcony, it now feels like you’re listening in the room and not outside the room. You can hear everything, and it doesn’t have to be loud.”