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Large Church Installation - Greenwood UMC - Greenwood, IN

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RichardW

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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostSun Jan 13, 2019 12:36 pm

dw154515 wrote:it tends to get a big mid-low range bump that I find annoying.


My home set-up did the same originally. Both the monitors and the sub sounded OK separately but together it sounded as if they might be overlapping and that turned out to be the case.

Remember, you need to match the levels of both speakers and you need to make sure that the roll-off of the sub complements the "roll-up" of the monitors. So there are potentially four speaker settings for each sub/monitor combination that need to be aligned - two gain settings and two filter settings.

With the number of speakers that you have it would pay to get that sorted out first quite methodically and maybe some test equipment (e.g. signal generators) might be beneficial to remove some of the variables.

I don't know if anyone knows of an easy to get everything leveled up and evened out.

Regards,
Richard
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostMon Jan 14, 2019 11:39 am

Great post, Richard. I agree completely. A program like Room EQ Wizard (REW) would be extremely helpful as doing these adjustments by ear can be quite difficult. Be sure to balance a pair of front speakers against the subwoofers, not all the speakers, as with real world HW multichannel audio any given pipe is routed (typically) to a pair or front speakers only. Remove the "hump" by spreading crossover filtering further apart providing the front low cutoff and the sub high cutoff can be set independently. Correct any shelf in the response with gain controls.

It is helpful to separate all the pedal stops to a separate output group with its own high frequency speakers along with the subs, but I assume that has already been done.
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1961TC4ME

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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostMon Jan 14, 2019 11:42 am

I'm going to throw my 2-1/2 cents worth in and if ends up that's only what it's worth, then so be it. :lol:
First off, I'll just say up front that the layout for the speakers you've come up with would not be the approach I'd take. Even though in my case one experiment involved a smaller number of speakers laid out in the same arrangement, the end results were not good. I feel it's was for 2 main reasons. First, yes when you only have a limited number of stops pulled, as you notice it sounds good, and it should no matter the speaker layout and it's mainly because you don't have several speakers competing with each other. However as you notice, things go down hill so to speak as you pile on the stops, which leads me to my second reason. I feel the issue is the speakers are all too close to each other which first, blows the sound-field regardless if it's stereo or mono, the speakers are simply just too close to each other. I've tested speakers directly alongside each other and also with some space in between them, and as I've noted several times in some of my testing and reports here, speaker positioning alone by a few feet can make a HUGE difference in the sound outcome. Playing into this issue is you are likely using the cyclic option which as you know ends up with sound coming from all over the place and you have zero control over this which I feel presents a problem in itself. I have to be honest, from day one I have not been sold on the cyclic options, this idea on paper sounds good, but doesn't make sense to me because of some of the issues you encounter that I lay out above.

Next, I feel it's imperative that you treat any speaker layout for an organ in terms of either by divisions which works pretty good, OR better yet by stop pitch. You have to look at it in terms that an organ is broken up into many small families of stops or pipes. A given rank of pipes are not thrown all over the place inside the organ case, they're in a group together somewhere in that case. So, when it comes to speakers, why treat those same pipes as if they are all over inside the case in random places by having them sounding on random speakers all over the place?

If it were me, I'd take your 24 channels per side and arrange each side in most likely a total of 6 groups of 4 speakers each. In addition, regardless of the stop, each stop needs equal representation, so hence my feeling for equal representation is you need an equal number of speakers representing each.

I would first lay out the speakers in columns of 4 stacked on top of each other, in this arrangement you end up with 6 stacks of 4 per side, the stacks I would say need to be at least a foot, probably more like two feet from each other, this you could experiment with some but I'd say this should work quite well. Any further spacing and things could go the wrong direction again.

Next, assign stops based on pitch per each group of speakers. Let's say your first stack L / R is channels 1-4, assign all stops 2' and higher including mixtures. Next for channels 5-8 L / R assign all 4' stops, channels 9-12 L / R all horn stops, channels 13-16 L / R all 8' stops, channels 17-20 L / R all 16' stops, leaving channels 21-24 L / R for any 32's, maybe odd ball 10-2/3rd stops, Prosaune, Bombarde, etc. Here again you can experiment some with a few stops to see where they fit best as you might find in this arrangement maybe the mixtures as an example play along nicer with the group you sent the horn stops to as an example. But regardless, you should not find in following this recipe that you need to re-invent the wheel in terms of where certain stops need to go, it should be pretty simple and I think you will be quite pleased with the results.

Oh, and just one more little add in here, the Armley Schulze would be an awesome choice for instruments.

Marc
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engrssc

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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostMon Jan 14, 2019 12:25 pm

1961TC4ME wrote:Oh, and just one more little add in here, the Armley Schulze would be an awesome choice for instruments


Aside from Marc's other comments which I totally agree with, Armley Schulze is a super good sample set, esp in a church setting.

Rgds,
Ed
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostMon Jan 14, 2019 12:41 pm

A very remarkable choice to apply studio monitors in a church hall!

I am afraid that the result will never satisfy. A lot of dB and noise in the church hall, but no organ sounds that can compete with real pipes. I wish you a lot of strength, patience and wisdom with the adjustment of the entire installation.

Look at the link of the church building where 1 set of stereo speakers is placed that is mentioned in the post of 12 March.

https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=nl&pb ... CnoECAYQBg
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostMon Jan 14, 2019 2:02 pm

Hi Drew;

The Behringers have a switch on the back that is supposed to make matching up with a subwoofer easier. You may find some relief by deploying that switch.

Early on I noticed some of the same effects with the mid-low range bump you mention in my installation. To combat that I had also deployed the other two attenuation switches early on but a few weeks ago I zeroed all three out. Fortunately, my earlier work in balancing things still paid off as the problems were far fewer than when I started voicing 5+ years ago and the sound is substantially more present and broad.

Pipe organs naturally diffuse the sound by the incalculable reflections created in the chambers/case by the physical presence of the pipes themselves, not to mention the differences in how reeds and flues direct their sound. Anything to diffuse the sound from your speakers will benefit. The suggestions about aiming some speakers up and spacing them apart I think are very good places to start.

I'm guessing you, being in the line of work you are, have a good idea about the frequency response of the room so imposing an overall inverse curve on the speaker array might be of some value.
Brooke Benfield
Organist, Gethsemane Lutheran Church
Portland OR
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostTue Jan 15, 2019 9:39 am

PCM wrote:I am afraid that the result will never satisfy. A lot of dB and noise in the church hall, but no organ sounds that can compete with real pipes. I wish you a lot of strength, patience and wisdom with the adjustment of the entire installation.


I had the good fortune of doing a Hauptwerk installation alongside an existing pipe organ and can assure all that the sound of real pipes can be matched with studio monitors, at least in a smaller sanctuary using stereo (two speakers on any tone). I would go to something larger if required of course. It was interesting to hear the two organs playing together and a challenge to identify the source of any given rank.
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engrssc

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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostTue Jan 15, 2019 10:46 am

Note the speaker spacing:

https://youtu.be/qPoVqIsQs5M?t=44

And, yes, far fewer speakers here.

Rgds,
Ed
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostTue Jan 15, 2019 12:01 pm

I am interested in learning how to set up speakers and the routing algorithms to use so that they match real pipes in the room. My room is a medium sized residential great room. Can the 48 speaker system shown in this thread be scaled down and still produce good results? If I could just get one rank to sound plausible I would be happy. If I had a diapason chorus to sound plausible I would be in seventh heaven! I have been using headphones (AKG 712) and a sub woofer. There are many disadvantages to head phones such as fatigue and the organ seeming to be in my head rather than in the room. I would like to try a speaker system. Do the listeners need to sit in the stereo sweet spot? How big can the sweet spot be? How many speakers do you need / can you use to good advantage in a residential living room of medium size? Do you route each rank to a stereo pair? Or is it better to route notes?
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostTue Jan 15, 2019 6:38 pm

engrssc wrote:Note the speaker spacing:

https://youtu.be/qPoVqIsQs5M?t=44

And, yes, far fewer speakers here.

These are Def Tech SM450 passive studio monitors. They have a 10" passive radiator on the left side so it needs some room to move some air. You can see the dark outline of these in the video but definitely visible here:
https://www.crutchfield.com/S-iEnl5uNHPxE/p_735SM450/Definitive-Technology-StudioMonitor-450.html

Danny B.
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magnaton

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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostWed Jan 16, 2019 1:22 am

1961TC4ME wrote:First, yes when you only have a limited number of stops pulled, as you notice it sounds good, and it should no matter the speaker layout and it's mainly because you don't have several speakers competing with each other. However as you notice, things go down hill so to speak as you pile on the stops, which leads me to my second reason. I feel the issue is the speakers are all too close to each other which first, blows the sound-field regardless if it's stereo or mono, the speakers are simply just too close to each other.

Hi Marc:

A nice contribution that I enjoy reading, in fact read it twice to make sure I had full understanding :-). Your point on speaker spacing may be valid for the large Sanctuary. I happen to have the same model Behringers and they are horizontal, right next to each other, 4 on each side. I don't have any problems with this arrangement with any registration be it small or full organ. Granted my space is only 16 X 27 and the monitors are toed in about 20 degrees towards the console with the woofers about at ear level. I had 3 on each side for good while and when I finally added the 4th (for a tight fit) the sound stage improved further.

1961TC4ME wrote:I have to be honest, from day one I have not been sold on the cyclic options, this idea on paper sounds good, but doesn't make sense to me because of some of the issues you encounter that I lay out above.

The cyclic works great for the Paramount sample sets. The samples are bone dry and the organ highly unified. Actually it sounds pretty good using divisional routing too but you get more power with the cyclic option as recommended by POW as published on their website. I think someone else said that the cyclic option works best for any dry sample set.


1961TC4ME wrote:Next, I feel it's imperative that you treat any speaker layout for an organ in terms of either by divisions which works pretty good, OR better yet by stop pitch. You have to look at it in terms that an organ is broken up into many small families of stops or pipes. A given rank of pipes are not thrown all over the place inside the organ case, they're in a group together somewhere in that case. So, when it comes to speakers, why treat those same pipes as if they are all over inside the case in random places by having them sounding on random speakers all over the place?

My family and I were in Indy after Christmas and I stopped by the church one evening to give Drew a hand with the MOTU config and HW routing. Indeed we had 12 speakers (6 stereo pairs) per organ division (audio group) which used the cyclic option. Left and Right channels in each group were all next to each other. We followed the console design; Great and Choir was on the right jamb thus these divisions used the 24 speakers on the right. Unfortunately I had limited time so we focused on his biggest concerns at that time which we resolved.


1961TC4ME wrote:Next, assign stops based on pitch per each group of speakers. Let's say your first stack L / R is channels 1-4, assign all stops 2' and higher including mixtures. Next for channels 5-8 L / R assign all 4' stops, channels 9-12 L / R all horn stops, channels 13-16 L / R all 8' stops, channels 17-20 L / R all 16' stops, leaving channels 21-24 L / R for any 32's, maybe odd ball 10-2/3rd stops, Prosaune, Bombarde, etc. Here again you can experiment some with a few stops to see where they fit best as you might find in this arrangement maybe the mixtures as an example play along nicer with the group you sent the horn stops to as an example. But regardless, you should not find in following this recipe that you need to re-invent the wheel in terms of where certain stops need to go, it should be pretty simple and I think you will be quite pleased with the results.

Marc, I think this is a very valuable suggestion. I reread your posting where you originally explained this routing scheme:
http://forum.hauptwerk.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=14769&p=110973
With this many channels no doubt you can get a healthy "like sounding" rank separation count! Of course it depends on the sample set if you are able to preserve organ division X left speaker arrays and organ division Y, right speaker arrays.


1961TC4ME wrote:Oh, and just one more little add in here, the Armley Schulze would be an awesome choice for instruments.

While I was there, we installed the Evaluation version. I was easy able to fill the sanctuary with a powerful, full sound using only the Great Principal 8 and Octave! I've had this set for almost 2 years and I'm still amazed at what it can do!

Danny B.
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostWed Jan 16, 2019 4:31 am

magnaton wrote:
1961TC4ME wrote:Oh, and just one more little add in here, the Armley Schulze would be an awesome choice for instruments.

While I was there, we installed the Evaluation version. I was easy able to fill the sanctuary with a powerful, full sound using only the Great Principal 8 and Octave! I've had this set for almost 2 years and I'm still amazed at what it can do!


Referring to Armley Schulze, we regularly get comments like - 'It sounds so much like a real pipe organ".

Rgds,
Ed
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostWed Jan 16, 2019 11:30 am

Ed and Danny, thanks much for the input. If there's something I can say concerning my routing scheme, it has evolved some over time. In part it involves certain stops I first assumed (based mainly on other stop grouping results) would work best in a given speaker group along with other stops. The next part of it has been speaker positioning which I've found to be equally important, especially providing it's in combination with the stops going to the right place.

I first discovered a single column of speakers L / R stacked on top of each other in a smaller set-up worked very good, and when I first went to larger tower speakers (which I can not stack), proposed a new problem. After careful routing and putting a certain amount of space between things I once again discovered a very superior sounding arrangement that I at first did not think was possible simply because I had went to towers and made an assumption in error. In this arrangement, things are much more critical, but in the end I'm very pleased with the results. The main reason I went this direction was I had the intention to produce a more robust and fuller sound that my smaller bookshelf speakers were not providing. I'm glad I took the time to sort it all out.

Going back to my earlier post here, just to add a few thoughts...... First, I would just for the sake of trying things, ditch the algorithms idea, use the recipe based on pitch I outline to 6 groups per side and do it in stereo, not mono. You could go out to 8 stacks of 3 per side, but surprisingly I've found more is not necessarily better and may actually be unnecessary. If you look at it, a flue is a flue, a horn is a horn, each just with different (but similar) timbres and intensities.

Look at each stop and identify it as belonging to a family by flue, reed, or some type of mixture. Flues can be further broken down and grouped together on separate speaker groups based on length, 2', 4', 8', etc., etc., here you've got plenty of channels to easily do that! 8) As long as they're in the same family and combined to the same speaker group, they will play nice with each other. You also have to consider how and when they are used. As an example, even though they fall basically into the same family, you're not likely to mix a clarinet with an 8' or 16' horn at the same time as you'd likely use the clarinet or the horn(s) by themselves as a solo line, but again they fit into the same family. Likewise, you're not likely to mix a soft sounding vox angelica with an 8' principal as an example, but they can still go to the same speaker group as I've found. One that did surprise me a bit was mixtures in the Armley Schulze work best in the same group as the horns, the 2' by themselves in another group. Again, if you follow the recipe, you should not find yourself laboring much over which goes best with what, and you'll find that (maybe) only a very small (less than a handful) of stops that need to be tweaked by trying them in another group just to get the best clarity out of them.

Thanks for reading! :wink:

Marc
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostWed Jan 16, 2019 4:10 pm

Thanks for the input, everyone.

I must admit that this is all a bit daunting but I enjoy it. I knew this would be the most "experimental" part of the entire project.

What you're saying about grouping families of stops together is interesting and I definitely will be giving that a shot here in a couple of hours.

Back in my days of doing recording work, I was given a great bit of advice from someone that, at the time, sounded revolutionary, but in reality is very obvious ----

"Any sounds in a stereo image, in the same x, y, and z, space will compete with each other. The loudest will prevail."

x = PAN (location left to right)
y = FREQUENCY (pitch)
z = TIME (3rd dimension)

Basically, imagine listening under a pair of headphones. Two sounds in roughly the same frequency range (kick drum and bass guitar perhaps), panned to the same L/R location (usually panned CENTER), playing at the same time, will result in one being over-powered by the other.

The solution is/was to do one or more of the following:

A.) EQ one to help separate the frequencies (do you want a low booming kick drum and a tight punchy slap bass or the exact opposite?),
B.) PAN them to two different locations. Say, move the kick drum 50% right and the bass 50% left (usually you'll find them both panned center in most studio recordings)
C:) DELAY one slightly, or add a slap-back reverb, etc. Something to offset the timing slightly.

So, on the surface of it, it sounds like your layout would actually make things WORSE by having multiple voices routed to the same group at the same 16/8/4/2 etc. pitch. However, we aren't dealing with 2 speakers. I have 48. And I don't have one stereo image - I have 24. There's much more at play here than a simple stereo image.

Arrrrggggg!!!!! It's so frustrating but I love it so!

There's no substitute for actual results, though. You testify to me that it sounds great, so that's good enough for me to abandon by thought process and give it a shot!

Thanks a bunch!!

Hopefully I will have some results to share in the next few hours.

Wish me luck.
Drew A. Worthen
Master of Music in Composition - Butler University
http://www.drewworthen.com
Director of Music & Website Admin - Greenwood UMC
http://www.greenwoodumc.org
Design Engineer - American Sound and Electronics - Indy
https://americansound.cc/
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Re: Large Church Installation - Open Conversation, Please

PostWed Jan 16, 2019 4:51 pm

dw154515 wrote:Thanks for the input, everyone.

I must admit that this is all a bit daunting but I enjoy it. I knew this would be the most "experimental" part of the entire project.

What you're saying about grouping families of stops together is interesting and I definitely will be giving that a shot here in a couple of hours.


So, on the surface of it, it sounds like your layout would actually make things WORSE by having multiple voices routed to the same group at the same 16/8/4/2 etc. pitch. However, we aren't dealing with 2 speakers. I have 48. And I don't have one stereo image - I have 24. There's much more at play here than a simple stereo image.



Hey Drew,

Haha! Yeah, daunting to say the least. The beauty of Hauptwerk is if it doesn't work, then you've got about a million other options to try! :mrgreen: Yes, if I were saying to send 16/8/4 etc. all through the same speakers it's not going to sound even remotely as good as it could, I've been there and done that. Even with my current set up and number of speakers, trust me, I can make the Armley sound really crappy if I want just by how I route things and oh boy, have I ever had the thing sounding bad, to the point I play one chord and shut it down and say to myself "well, back to the drawing board."

Just to give things as fair a shot as you can, please also be sure to stack the speakers in sets of 4 for a total of 6 stacks per side and I'd say put them side to side distance 1'+ from each other.

I'd also be happy to share my exact routing scheme by rank for the Armley Schulze if it helps.

Will be very curious to see if this works, it would be a first for me with this idea in a large setup, but I'm feeling pretty good about it. Fingers crossed.

Marc
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