Case study
Normandale Lutheran: speech intelligibility in a hard sanctuary
One loudspeaker on one side of a reverberant room, replaced with a system aimed at people instead of plaster.
- Project type Sound system installation — design by others
- Our role Rigging, wiring & commissioning
- Result High speech intelligibility during services, in a room that fights you the whole way
The room
A sanctuary with hard surfaces and a long reverberation tail — the kind of room that is wonderful for an organ and actively hostile to a spoken word.
The sanctuary is roughly 48 by 62 feet — long enough that a single source at one end is asking one loudspeaker to do the work of a system.
The problem
A single Danley enclosure covering the whole room from one side. Coverage fell away across the seating, and the further from the box you sat, the more of the room you heard and the less of the sermon.
The design
Specified and supplied through Allied Productions & Sales. Our scope was the rigging, the wiring and the commissioning.
The arrays were ordered in a custom RAL off-white matched to the sanctuary. That was in the specification from the start rather than argued into the budget later — in a worship space, what the system looks like is part of whether it gets approved at all.
The install
A pre-wire visit of about 10.5 crew hours, then roughly 17 crew hours plus overtime on the install itself — six working days in the building, scheduled around the service calendar and finished in time for Christmas.
The pre-wire carried the bulk of it: roughly 2,500 feet of West Penn 12-2 and 2,000 feet of 291 pulled through a finished building, with Unistrut and half-inch threaded rod set for the mounting points. Only then did the old system come down, and tuning got its own day after everything was terminated and tested.
The result
High speech intelligibility during services, in a room that fights you the whole way. The acoustics did not change — nothing was done to the reverberation, and nothing should have been, because that is what the organ and the choir live on. What changed is how much of the amplified sound lands on people.
The system
Two L-Acoustics A10i arrays with X8 outfills, finished in a custom RAL off-white.
Related
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