Text Box: Inside this issue: Text Box: E-Notes  Volume 1, Issue 4   Page 1     Text Box: Special points of interest: · Events · Studio Showcase · Live Sound/Recording Tips · Field tests · Equipment Marketplace · Reviews · Profiles · Monthly Feature Text Box: Elite System Inc. Text Box: Tel. 228-4735 Text Box: Volume 1, Issue 4 Text Box: What to look for, what to listen for.    Most people only notice sound when it is bad, and this is usually in very public places like airports, arenas, gymnasiums, and churches.      Speakers and speaker cabinets haven’t been able to take full advantage of the digital revolution but they have become more accurate in the sounds that they produce and where they deliver them. Although now that they can deliver the expanded frequency and dynamic range that defines CD quality sound at home or in your car, it is quite a different story in a house of worship.  Intelligibility and musicality are what defines quality in the latter. Intelligibility, in regards to the fact that what people are saying must be understood. Musicality is the accurate reproduction of live sound (voices, acoustic instruments and electronic instruments) and recorded sound. Most importantly, “THE LOUDSPEAKER SYSTEM MUST DISTRIBUTE QUALITY SOUND AS EVENLY AS POSSIBLE THROUGHOUT THE LISTENING AREA”.                Now if one looks at the typical house of worship environment then one will usually see a big open area with balconies and cubbyholes. These places were mostly built before the advent of any serious technology in sound and therefore constructed very “live” to help voices reach the back of the room without the aid of amplification. Text Box: Thanks to acoustic treatments most of these places can be made to handle electronically amplified sound and speakers with proper dispersion can now do the job properly.              Ideally loudspeakers with a tight, beamed coverage pattern (60 degrees horizontal x 40 degrees vertical) work best as you can then pick and choose exactly where you want the sound to go, mostly away from reflective surfaces and more at the listeners. In places where the room is extra long, delay speakers will help keep the volume of the front loudspeakers down, and give better coverage and lessen the amount of reverberation of the walls and windows. Most likely under balconies, delay speakers will be the only way of maintaining intelligibility in such areas.              The final step is to then properly align the loudspeakers and equalize them to the room. The delay settings for the satellite speakers will be most important when the room is full to keep all everything crystal clear. A full house will make the room less reverberant and should be accounted for. Put another way, people can help the overall acoustic performance of a worship space, which when you think about it, makes perfect sense.                Condensed from Church Production Magazine July 1999 by Mark Johnson. Text Box: Houses of Worship Sound:

  Sound Worship

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 End of a Monopoly

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High cost of sound

Future suffers

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Music Web Links

3.

Tech Corner

“Sidechain”

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Digital Recording

Tips

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