Sun Mar 20, 2016 12:54 pm
While not esp a fan of Bose, mostly due to price as in bang for the buck. But I had to do a sound system for a church that is for the moment leasing what was formerly a large open office space seating approx 400 +. The bigger issue, sound wise is the fact that the the ceiling height is 9 ft and the ceiling is drop in acoustic tile. A real bummer in all regards. They did not want distributed speakers built into the ceiling as you see many times in stores, etc. Ideally I would have liked to use several line arrays up front but the ones that, spec wise, would have served the purpose would have extended down so that at least some taller folks would have had to have ducked to get under them. The shorter arrays, didn't work either as those in the back most areas wouldn't have been able to hear. Bummer here too.
So we tried 4 -Bose 802W speakers mounted right up against the ceiling in the front (approx 18 ft in front of the altar area) and with their wood grained cabinets, blend in with the decor fairly well.. This "auditorium/sanctuary" is unusual in that the altar area is in one corner, and the seating area fans across left to right fairly wide and deep. These 802W's really did the job. With good parametric equalization, etc, the sound op would have to work at it to get even a hint of acoustical feedback. And further, some older hard of hearing members that formerly used RF receiver assisted hearing aids no longer needed them.
The music "pros" insisted on a Johannes instrument and even with the best speakers the Johannes rep could offer, the organ just didn't make it at all. In "desperation", the Johannes guy asked for some help. So we took a mix from the organ and fed that signal (properly equalized) thru the console, and the organ "came alive", but the pedal division was at best puny. The fix for that was to build a House Wrecker which takes the lower range from the organ thru it's own power amp, the HW is installed in the corner basically behind the altar area and it is definitely heard or maybe better said, it's presence is felt. Just for comparison, we turned off our organ support feeds, and what a difference. Granted some reasonably delicate balance is needed initially in the setup, but after that, the organ sounds not at all bad, even tho I'm not a Johannes fan either. I did try my Portable Hauptwerk setup and that was really good even under these adverse room conditions. So they know, now, what can be and have to decide on priorities. Their max attendance has been close to 500 and even with that larger number (for that room), everyone heard fine.
Rgds,
Ed