The Video Venue - Sound Design

The most important part of designing any worship center is the sound/acoustical design. I have been in enough bad sounding worship environments, as well as well designed ones to know the dramatic difference the right system makes. Take a good sounding band with a good sound tech and good mix but, if the sound design is week, the quality of a bad sound setup can take away from the entire worship service.

Our main worship center is one of those worship rooms that has more mistakes in its sound design then successes, so when we started to design the new video venue worship center I was determined that we would not make any of those mistakes in this project.

On a side note, if you don’t want to make mistakes in design you can not allow the voices of those that don’t know what they are talking about, in the world of audio design, to make final decisions and cuts to the project. If cuts have to be made let them be made by those that can decided what is really wise, not by those that do what looks good on paper to an accountant.

Knowing I wanted a good sounding room I had to address the many issues that came with this space. The issue of a concrete floor, cinder blocks walls and a low ceiling. The solution was to put 10 speakers, the Yamaha IF2208 speaker, throughout the room. (See pic)

We placed these speakers strategically for each to cover a small space and placed them about 20ft apart so that there was even coverage throughout the room. (See Diagram)

I know for some this may seem like overkill but this was the best thing we could have done, and it worked! The room has perfectly even coverage. As one person said “No matter where I go in the room I feel like the speaker (person) is speaking right at me”. This also allowed the sound board to be placed to the side of the room in direct line of sight of one of the speakers and still be able to mix for the entire room.

We also placed two Yamaha subs at each side of the stage. The Yamaha IS1218 gave us a great sound and they fill the room giving a one of best sounding rooms I have ever heard. (See Pic)

This again speaks to the point about doing it right. The Yamaha IS1218’s are nearly twice the size as the subs we have in our main worship center. The main room is twice the size of the venue yet was installed with only 3 speakers (cheap speakers) and two subs; both speakers are smaller then ones installed in the video venue.

If any church is going to invest into a worship center sound system it is vital that you get the right people for the job and the leadership recognize the need to do it right and empower those that will be running that sound each week. The leadership at First Free did just that and now we have an incredible sounding room that has setup our ministries to be successful at what they where designed to do in this space.