Rooms
The rooms we build sound for
Every kind of room fails in its own way. Knowing which failure you are looking at is most of the job.
Every room on this list fails a visitor in a different way. A sanctuary with too much reverberation turns intelligible speech into noise the moment someone raises the level to compensate for it. A dining room asks one system to do two contradictory jobs at once — carry music with some presence, and let a conversation survive at the next table — and no volume knob solves that. A performance room fails an entirely different test: whether a touring engineer with an hour to spare trusts what is hanging above the stage before the doors open.
None of that is really a loudness problem, whatever it sounds like standing in the room. It is coverage, zoning or trust, and the fix looks different each time — treatment and aim in a sanctuary, zones and isolation in a restaurant, headroom and documentation in a venue. Naming which one you actually have is most of the diagnosis; buying a bigger speaker rarely is.
Houses of worship
A sanctuary is built to carry an unamplified voice and used to deliver a spoken one. The reverberation that flatters a choir is the same reverberation that strips the consonants out of a sermon, and turning the system up only feeds it. Add a volunteer at the console and a congregation that does not want to look at loudspeakers, and the constraints are unusually tight.
Sound systems for houses of worship
Bars and restaurants
A dining room has to do two contradictory things at once — carry music with some weight, and let people at the same table hear each other. Add a stage and it has to do a third. Most rooms fail because they have one system and one volume control for spaces that need three of each.
Sound systems for bars and restaurants
Theaters and venues
A performance room is judged by visiting engineers who have an hour to make it work and no patience for surprises. That means even coverage to the back and the balcony, real headroom, and rigging that can carry a touring rig off structure somebody has actually verified.
Sound systems for theaters and music venues
Schools and auditoriums
A school gym is hard surfaces from the floor to the roof, and it is usually wired with a few speakers on the wall at court level that blast the nearest bleachers and leave everyone else listening to the echo. The answer is aim, not volume: put the sound on the stands, and leave the controls simple enough for whoever is on shift.
Sound systems for school gyms and auditoriums
Related
Tell us about the room.
Send over the venue, the date and roughly what you need. We read every request and reply with real questions, not a form letter.