Church Sound Systems

Church Name: Kanata Baptist Church. Kanata, Ontario, Canada.

The Church was Design by an Architect and Local Acoustical Company.
This new churches needed to be rescued. It was a successful salvage operation.
The basic shape is square with an outcrop for the choir and musicians.

Picture 1: Front View: Church seating is about 400 with the balcony.
The Arch will cut the sound of the choir by 6dB




These outrounds were added to reduce the standing wave problems encounter by the parallel walls.
The large outround over the door enclosed the heating and air ducts.
The ducts were added as an after thought.
After putting the idea in the church board head to add the outrounds, a church member thought of enclosing the duct. A team decision in solving problems.



The speakers are in the sweetspot and the system does sound very, very good with EAW speakers and Media Matrix XFrame to control everything. A A&H GL2200 was used with the latest options.
With the current setup there is about 1.4 seconds of RT60 between 300 to 3,000 hertz. The %alcons was measured in 42 different places ranging from 3.9 to 4.8%. The test was done by feeding a test signal from a test speaker feeding sound into a mic at the pulpit at 18 inches with the most current MLSSA 10.D system (www.mlssa.com) The worst spot was in the balcony in the back row. This was before the Balcony acoustical diffuser panels.
The Cupola was already partly built when I was brought into the project. My objections were not enough to have that changed. The Cupola will have PPD panels added, tuned to 600 hertz. 24dB of energy has to be dampened from the Cupola. The bracket is all steel. It can support up to 2000 pounds




The cost of all the acoustical changes was under $10,000.
The sound system was installed mostly by church members and cost under $25,000.

More Pictures to come



This is a 4 x 8 panels with 3 sono tubes. The Roxul is only there to support the cloth. A total of 4 panels were made.



Above the soundman position, the 4 panels were mounted and the cloth was painted. Please notice the balcony. Below is a 2 x 4 panels with sono tubes and wood to make low cost diffuser for the curved face of the balcony.





As you can see, the outround that covers the air ducts wound up becoming a center piece to hang the cross from. The Architect objected doing any of the acoustical treatment. After some prayer, the Architect changed his mind. Today the Architect was given praise for his design of the church.

Church Name: Indonesian Community Church, Toronto, Ontatrio Canada

One of the items I try to encourage is for churches to make their own acoustical panels when budgets are very limited.


PPD Panels, a very efficient acoustical panel that does diffusion, bass and mid range absorption can be made by church members. It is a panel that I invented. There are designed to treat the four most common problems church have in a single acoustical device. Standing Waves, Echo's, Excess Reverberation noise and Bass Control


One of the final steps in make acoustical panels is making them look good.




Once the chairs are in place, the room behave very well. A total of 98 panels were installed. The cost of these panels was less than the cost of doubling the cost of the speaker system. With the acoustical panels, the sound system is able to play 6dB louder than without the treatment. The church could have spent 3 time the money on the speaker system, but they would still have echo's, standing waves and excessive reverberation which would have limited congreagational singing, the performance of the praise team and limited intelligibility.


On the left in the speaker cluster. The sub was mounted in the cluster. The cluster in not in the sweetspot. This is a case where the Architect ruled over this one issue and I had to agree. What you don't see yet is the yet to be installed basketball hoops. If the cluster was placed further forward, it would have interfered with basketball, volleyball and other games.



There is some additional acoustical treatment yet to be installed in the stage area and behind the speakers. Before they are designed or built, I will be going back to the church for the final phase of the acoustics and sound system setup.



The sub woofer is a Servo Drive. Since the room is well treated for bass control/diffusion, the ability to use such a heavy/power sub woofer such as this is possible. The main speakers are EAW's. The monitor for the choir and stage is Community.

More Project Pictures

I am now starting my 19th year doing Church Sound exclusively. Since January 1981 to the present. I have been employed by over 500 churches. In my travels I have visited another 300+ churches. I have taken acoustical samples of most of them. I have a library of 700 churches sampled with my test equipment. I have sample measurements of most of the sound systems of the churches I visited. From my training, I can honestly state that every system, from my very first installation to today, all of those system are still being used as first designed. Over time, many of these systems have been upgraded as technology has changed and most of these churches called me back. I am not and expert or authority in the subject, but I do have a lot of experience and a track record that speaks for itself.