Question! What would you do to fix the Acoustics of this Church?
Posted by jdbsound on April 1, 2015
You have a church that seats 750 people. It is a simple rectangle room with 30 ft walls, 40 ft to the peak, 80 ft wide and 140 ft long. The reverb is 2.2 seconds at 300 hertz and 1.3 seconds at 2000 hertz. An Energy Time Curve test show reflections over 30dB at one second on the ETC in the 300 hertz range. The floors are carpeted and the pews are padded seats and backs. All of the walls and ceiling are insulated drywall on 12 inch centers. Basically there is about 30dB of excess energy at 300 hertz. 300 Hertz has a wave length of 3.75 ft. The church has already tried 4 different sound systems over 10 years and all of them were designed and installed by companies that are supposed to be the best in the business and they all started off saying that the room needs to be fixed – but church board members vetoed anything that would change the aesthetics of the room – but it was OK to hang 2 ugly line arrays which lasted only 6 months.
The church is now asking for another sound system but this time all of the professional audio companies turned down the project and said to the church don’t call us back until you fix the room. Now the church board has relented and they are allowing acoustical panels to be mounted on the walls. What acoustical method or system would you use to fix the problem? What will reduce energy 30dB in this space?
For all the walls in the church, between windows, doors and bulkheads, there is only 35% of the total wall space available to mount acoustical panels on. Major issues are – Stage noise, floor monitors as loud as main speaker system in the first 10 rows. Only 20% of the congregation is ever singing. Speech intelligibility is below 85% in full range – if you roll off the sound system at 200 hertz speech intelligibility improves to 88%. Gain before feedback is very poor after 3 or more microphones are turned on at the same time. Subs never really sound right. Pastor hears echoes all the time off the side walls when preaching. Drummer can never hear himself or the other worship team members – even with the headset monitors. The are currently using electronic drums but they have tried drum shields and booths without much satisfaction.
The church used to have a 40 voice choir but they never sounded very good and now with over $150,000 invested in a praise and worship team with all the latest state of the art technology and higher trained sound engineers, they sound no better than what the choir did years ago – but they are better at entertaining people!
(note: this is a fictional church but this is based on actual events that have happened recently in three southern Ontario Churches.)
Joseph De Buglio
This entry was posted on April 1, 2015 at 1:51 PM and is filed under Church Acoustics, Church Sound Systems. Tagged: Acoustical Blue print, acoustics, Amplifier, Architect, barrel Diffuser, Cathedral, Church, Church acoustics, Church sound, church sound system, Church Sound Systems, drywall, EQ. Equalizer, Hearing, house of worship, Microphones, pipe organ. worship, Signal Processor, standing wave, windows, worship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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