Stone Solid Productions elevates sound quality in thriving Chicago church with CODA Audio N-RAY …
“The experience we had from start to finish with CODA Audio and SSP was phenomenal. The difference in clarity, coverage, and overall tonal consistency compared to our previous system was immediately apparent. It was a truly night and day improvement. The CODA system delivers even coverage throughout the room with significantly improved vocal intelligibility, transients, and tonal/musical separation and clarity.
Located in the Tinley Park suburb of Chicago, Disciples Church is a multicultural Christian house of worship whose core values embrace discipleship, spiritual growth, authentic relationships, and service. Led by pastors Brent and Sol McQuay, the thriving Church serves a large congregation and ignites faith through its wide-ranging program of sermons, prayer, and events. Music plays a central role in worship at the Church, which recently invested in a new audio system to improve the experience of both congregation, musicians, and presenters. The Church engaged AVL specialist Stone Solid Productions (SSP) to design and install a new CODA Audio sound system.
SSP draws on the last experience of Chris and Danny Stone, both of whom have spent their professional lives immersed in the world of professional audio, video and lighting. Spanning the USA from Arizona to Ohio to Tennessee, their portfolio includes churches, theatres, performing arts centres, and recording studios, so the Disciples Church team knew they were in good hands.
With a capacity of more than four hundred seats in a traditional rectangular architectural layout, Disciples Church had been prone to severe audio dead spots, uneven frequency response, and inconsistent vocal intelligibility. SSP’s previous experience of CODA systems informed their recommendation of a CODA Audio N-RAY solution, as Danny Stone explains:
“We first came across CODA Audio a little over three years ago when we were helping Only Believe Ministries plan a major upgrade in Ohio. I confess that as an engineer I’d been a devotee of another well-known brand for quite some time, and so was pretty skeptical about this relatively new kid on the block, but something about CODA’s engineering philosophy – the physics, the driver technology, the SPL-to-size ratio – sparked my curiosity.
“Following an introduction through a mutual acquaintance we spoke to Luke and Michael at CODA Audio USA and were invited to California for a demo, but the pressure of work at the time meant we were unable to travel. So with no strings attached, such is CODA’s confidence in their products, they shipped a system to Missouri and set it up for a shootout with a competitor system in a 3000-seat theater which we’d mixed in many times. The arrays were time aligned, the rig was left completely flat and we pressed play. The effect was immediate – it didn’t just compete with what was a very good rig, it exceeded it in clarity, dynamic range, impact, and imaging. From that moment on SSP became a CODA integrator for life!”
Following that game-changing experience, SSP went on to install a number of CODA Audio systems in churches and theatres, including ViRAY, N-RAY, and APS.
For this latest install at Disciples Church, SSP’s Chris Stone, Danny Stone and JR Viers collaborated with CODA Audio USA’s Luke Jenks and Michael Creason on an N-RAY system design, using CODA’s proprietary prediction software, System Optimizer, to ensure precise horizontal and vertical coverage. N-RAY is an ultra-compact 3-way line array that places the benefits of CODA’s flagship AiRAY technology into a shallow, lightweight cabinet perfect for theatres, performing arts centres, and houses of worship.
The system comprised, per side, 7 x N-RAY ( 3 at 90° and 4 at 120°) with 3 x SCV-F sensor controlled-subwoofers. 7 x TiRAY per side acted as outfills, with a total of 6 x HOPS5 (high output point source) as frontfills completing the picture. The system is driven by 4 x CODA Audio LINUS12C DSP amplifiers and a single LINUS14 DSP amplifier.
Danny Stone describes the system:
“What the N-RAY gives Disciples Church is remarkably high output, pristine intelligibility and linearity, even at lower volumes. TiRAY, whilst incredibly small, fills the outer seating zones with consistency and precision, while the SCV-F subs have extremely tight low-end control, delivering Stadium level punch without overwhelming the room. The HOPS5 frontfills offer studio monitor clarity to the first several rows – delays were not required, as the main arrays and fills comfortably achieve full coverage of the room. Previous issues surrounding dead zones, poor vocal clarity, inconsistencies from row to row, and subwoofers that excited the room unevenly, have been totally resolved by the new CODA system.
“Importantly for the Church, the system offered an ideal price/performance ratio, while maintaining CODA’s signature fidelity, output, and imaging. Even within a tight budget, not a single corner was cut.”
According to Danny, the congregation at Disciples Church can now hear the mix exactly as the engineer intends:
“The system receives a steady stream of compliments from church-goers and technical staff, alike. CODA brings the experience of a world-class concert rig that you might find in a 70,000-seater stadium and places it into a church. I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s ‘massive’ but controlled, warm but never muddy, detailed but never harsh – it feels like a spiritual experience rather than a technical one, redefining what modern worship environments can sound like.”
Edis Kabula, Audio Director at Disciples Church agrees:
“The experience we had from start to finish with CODA Audio and SSP was phenomenal. The difference in clarity, coverage, and overall tonal consistency compared to our previous system was immediately apparent. It was a truly night and day improvement. The CODA system delivers even coverage throughout the room with significantly improved vocal intelligibility, transients, and tonal/musical separation and clarity.
“Special mention must go to the tuning done by Michael Creason. His expertise played a major role in achieving that result. Equally impressive was the professionalism and care shown by Danny alongside his SSP team. Their attention to detail throughout installation, deployment, and collaboration, ensured the system performed exactly as intended and left a very strong impression on us.”
SSP already has several more major CODA Audio projects underway, including a CiRAY upgrade at the Mansion Theater in Branson, Missouri, with 2026 expected to be a landmark year for CODA installations across the USA. Danny reserves his final comments for the CODA Audio USA team:
“CODA is always in our corner. Their communication is exceptional, they offer best-in-class design assistance, and their support is lighting-fast. We feel a true sense of partnership, where our clients’ interests are paramount – every CODA install deepens our belief that this is the future of live sound.”
