Hear It Where You See It: Inside Calgary Life Church's d&b Soundscape System
Picture a Sunday morning at Calgary Life Church.
The worship leader steps up to centre stage. A guitarist settles in on the left. Keys sit off to the right. Drums anchor the back.
Everyone in the room can see exactly where each sound is coming from.
For a long time, church audio told the ears a different story. Sound came out of two big stacks on either side of the stage, and where the band seemed to be depended on where you happened to sit. Grab a seat near the left speaker and the whole band moves over there with you.
Calgary Life Church wanted the eyes and the ears to agree.
So Sapphire installed a d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system. Thirty-two loudspeakers, seven amplifiers, and one very smart processor, all working on a simple idea: you should hear the vocals from the same place you see the vocalist.
We've been here before
This one has a bit of history.
Back in 2017, First Assembly Church here in Calgary asked Sapphire to take a fresh look at its sound. The sanctuary is a 240-degree fan, and the team wanted every seat to feel like the sweet spot.
The answer turned out to be a brand new platform d&b was just launching. It was called Soundscape. According to d&b, First Assembly became the first Soundscape installation in a house of worship anywhere in the world.
The first Soundscape system in a church anywhere in the world was in Calgary. Sapphire installed it.
Calgary Life Church is the next chapter of that story, in the same city, almost a decade later. The technology has grown up a lot since then. So has our playbook.
So what is Soundscape, in plain English?
Soundscape thinks in objects.
Every input on the mixing console can become a dot on a map of the stage. The lead vocal is a dot. The acoustic guitar is a dot. The pastor's headset mic is a dot.
Drag a dot to where that person is standing, and the processor works out how much of the signal each loudspeaker should play, and exactly when. The timing is the magic part. Your brain locates a sound by what reaches it first, so the system uses carefully calculated delays to pull each voice and instrument back to its real spot on stage.
The goal is a sound image that holds together for the person on the far left, the person on the far right, and the person in the back row.
d&b calls this software En-Scene. It can handle up to 64 sound objects at once, parked in one spot or moving around. Since March 2025, d&b ships En-Scene preinstalled on every new DS100 Signal Engine, including the one running at Calgary Life Church.
There's a second Soundscape module called En-Space. It uses acoustic fingerprints recorded in famous performance spaces to add natural reverb and character to a room. It's an incredibly powerful tool for transforming a space to work with your content in just a click.
Why this matters even more in a church
A congregation shows up to take part. People sing, they follow a message, and they sit pretty much everywhere, including the edges of wide rooms where a traditional left and right system has the hardest time.
Here's a neat piece of psychoacoustics that makes Soundscape so useful. Your brain is incredibly good at untangling sounds that come from different directions. Spread a worship band out in space and each part gets easier to hear on its own. The vocal sits in its own place, the keys sit in theirs, and the mix opens up with no one touching a fader.
The spoken word benefits too. When the pastor walks across the stage, the voice can stay anchored to the person. That small detail makes the room feel human.
What's actually in the room
Here's the system, piece by piece, and what each part is there to do.
9 × d&b U5 loudspeakers
The U5 is a compact two-way point source with dual 6.5-inch drivers and a 1-inch compression driver on a 90° by 60° horn. That horn rotates 90 degrees without tools, so the same box can be hung upright or on its side depending on where it needs to throw sound. It tops out at 133 dB. Look up in the photos and you'll spot them hung on pipe and truss, spread across the width of the room.
13 × d&b 42S loudspeakers
These are tiny, smaller than a shoebox. Each one weighs about 1.6 kg and packs a 4.5-inch driver and a 0.75-inch dome tweeter with wide 120° by 90° coverage. Recessed in its backbox, the coverage can be aimed in 5-degree steps.
2 × d&b 44S loudspeakers
Same compact family, with a tighter 90° by 30° pattern. Great for reaching a specific zone of the room while keeping sound off the ceiling.
8 × d&b Bi12-SUB subwoofers
Each one combines a 15-inch and a 10-inch driver in a cardioid design, with the ability to ground-stack if needed. Cardioid means the low end gets steered out toward the congregation and pulled back from the stage. This is the part you feel in your chest. Musicians get a cleaner stage, the mics pick up less rumble, and the bass lands where people actually sit.
6 × d&b 5D and 1 × d&b 40D amplifiers
Every d&b loudspeaker runs from a d&b amplifier that knows exactly what it's driving, with the matching EQ, protection, and settings built in. Both models are four-channel installation amps, which gives the system 28 amplifier channels in total. d&b optimized the U5 to run on the 5D.
1 × d&b DS100 Signal Engine
The brain of the whole thing. It's a big Dante audio matrix with level and delay control at every crosspoint, and it's where En-Scene does its positioning work.
1 × d&b DS10 Audio Network Bridge
The translator. It takes Dante audio off the network and turns it into AES3 digital feeds for the amplifiers, and it carries the remote control data over the same Ethernet cable.
Why so many speakers and amps?
Good question, and it's the one most churches ask first.
Soundscape needs independent control over each loudspeaker position. That's how it builds a sound image across the whole room, and it's why the speaker count and amplifier channels matter.
Here's what we learned back at First Assembly. A wide room with a complex seating layout already needs a lot of loudspeakers and amplifier channels to get good coverage, even with a conventional design. Ben Burrell, Sapphire's managing partner, told d&b at the time that going with Soundscape actually reduced the cabinet count at First Assembly, and the amp count went down with it. The only added cost was the DS100 and the En-Scene license.
Today, En-Scene comes included with the DS100. So for the right room, the jump to Soundscape can be surprisingly small.
Follow the signal
Want to know how a voice gets from the stage to your seat? Here's the path.
The console. Calgary Life Church mixes on an Allen & Heath Avantis console, and Sapphire supplied a 128 by 128 Dante card so it can talk to the rest of the system over network.
The DS100. Every channel lands here as a Dante stream. En-Scene decides where each object lives and calculates the level and delay for every loudspeaker.
The DS10. Converts those Dante feeds into AES3 digital audio for the 40D amplifier. The 5D amplifiers support Dante directly into them.
The amps. The 5Ds and the 40D apply each loudspeaker's own processing and power the boxes.
The loudspeakers. And then, finally, it lands in your ears. All of that happens faster than you can blink.
The whole system is designed and configured with d&b's own software: ArrayCalc for planning and simulation, and R1 for control.
The front row gets love too
The people closest to the stage are often the hardest to cover well. The main loudspeakers are aimed out over the room, so the first few rows can end up hearing mostly drum kit and stage monitors.
That's the job of the compact d&b boxes lining the stage lip. They sit low and close, tuned and time-aligned to blend with the main system, so the front rows get the same clear, balanced mix as everyone else. And because Soundscape treats every loudspeaker as part of one picture, those front fills help hold the sound image together too.
What changes on a Sunday morning
Here's the part tech teams always want to know: does this make volunteers' lives harder?
The console still does what it always did. EQ, compression, levels, monitor mixes: all of that stays on the desk the team already knows. Positioning lives in the DS100. Once the band's usual layout is mapped, it can be saved as a scene and recalled whenever it's needed.
So on a typical Sunday, the person behind the console keeps mixing. The system takes care of putting each sound in its place.
Thinking about Soundscape for your church?
Five questions worth asking before you start:
How wide is your room? Fan-shaped and wide rooms tend to gain the most, because they're the rooms where left and right systems leave the most seats out of the picture.
Do you have mounting positions across the full width of the stage? Soundscape works best with a row of loudspeakers spread across the front.
What does your band layout look like week to week? A consistent layout makes scenes easy. A rotating one is fine too, it just means a little more planning.
Does your console speak Dante? If it does, or can with a card, the connection to the DS100 is simple.
Who's going to run it? Plan for training. A great system deserves a team that feels confident on it.
And the best advice we can give: go hear it. Soundscape makes the most sense in your ears.
The system at a glance
Component | Quantity |
d&b U5 loudspeaker | 9 |
d&b 42S loudspeaker | 13 |
d&b 44S loudspeaker | 2 |
d&b Bi12-SUB subwoofer | 8 |
d&b 5D amplifier | 6 |
d&b 40D amplifier | 1 |
d&b DS100 Signal Engine (En-Scene) | 1 |
d&b DS10 Audio Network Bridge | 1 |
Venue: Calgary Life Church, Calgary, Alberta
Integrator: Sapphire
Audio manufacturer: d&b audiotechnik
Platform: d&b Soundscape with En-Scene
Installed: 2026
Want to hear what your room could do?
Calgary Life Church is a good reminder that great sound starts with understanding the room and the people in it. The gear comes after.
If you're planning a new sanctuary, upgrading an aging PA, or just curious what Soundscape could sound like in your space, talk to the team that brought d&b Soundscape to its first church in the world.
Calgary Life Church × Sapphire × d&b audiotechnik
