How to Make a Worship Space Sound as Great as it Looks with Fewer Loudspeakers

BY DUDLEY MCLAUGHLIN

Learn how to overcome acoustic challenges inherent in the sweeping architecture of many worship centers.

The sanctuaries in many houses of worship are designed to impart a sense of awe, with high cathedral ceilings, majestic artwork or stained glass windows and areas dedicated to choirs or other musical accompaniment. The downside to those architectural features is that they often create a highly reverberant space with very low speech intelligibility.

Sound waves bounce off the floor, walls, ceiling and any other reflective (hard) surfaces, gradually losing energy over time. The harder the surfaces in the space, the longer it takes for the sound to decay and the greater the reverberation. A common acoustic measurement of a space is Reverberation Time 60 (RT60), which measures the time it takes after the sound source ceases to reduce the sound pressure level by 60 dB. While 60 dB may seem like a somewhat arbitrary number, the loudest sound level in orchestral music is typically around 100 dB, while 40 dB is a reasonable background noise level for listening to music. Loudspeakers with low directivity or those mounted in suboptimal locations can actually worsen the room’s intelligibility.

Taming the Reverberation

The first step to take in trying to improve the room’s acoustics is to establish a baseline. You can’t know what to fix, or where to apply the fix, until you have a better understanding of what you’re dealing with. Having the room’s acoustic profile modeled and measured by an AV consultant or acoustician is an excellent starting point. The results can be input into an acoustic modeling simulator like EASE software to understand the impact that different loudspeakers and their placement have on the audio performance of the space. Most loudspeaker manufacturers have performance data available in EASE-compatible formats so that you can import their profiles directly into the software for realistic simulations of the expected audio experience.

While selecting the ideal loudspeaker solution for the space and identifying the proper installation points are both critical, there’s other things you can do to the space to help reduce reverb. Breaking up the hard surfaces that sound waves bounce off of by installing acoustic treatments is a common practice for reducing reverberation. There’s a wide gamut of acoustic treatments available, but any soft surface, such as drapes, carpeting, or tapestries, will help reduce sound wave propagation. You can experiment at home by testing the acoustics in a bathroom before and after removing the towels and any rugs to see how much difference they make.

To be fair, many houses of worship prefer not to use acoustic treatments over concern that they compromise the grandeur of the space. But have faith: there’s more tools available to the integrator for creating a good acoustic outcome.

Choosing Which Loudspeakers Are the Best Fit

One benefit of a house of worship environment is that people often gather in discrete seating areas. Rather than elevating the acoustics everywhere, which can be costly, you can tailor an audio solution to give priority to that portion of the room. Choosing loudspeakers with tight dispersion patterns or, better yet, digitally-steerable arrays, delivers the audio primarily to those parts of the sanctuary where parishioners are seated.

Beam steering arrays are exceptionally well-suited for highly reverberant spaces, providing a level of flexibility and versatility that conventional loudspeakers simply can’t match. Digital arrays can be perfectly tailored to the environment with software-based adjustments, and coverage can be adjusted without the need for physical modifications if, for instance, the room layout changes.

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