Adding Sound to a 200 year old Church

This was the most interesting installation we scheduled for 2007, and it involved cleaning up the wiring they used for their sound system, and installing a speaker cluster. The building is a 200 plus year old church which has survived the weather of the ages including a lightning strike directly to the bell tower, two fires (one of which was the result of one of that lightning strike a little over a year ago, the former over 100 years ago), and the civil war. It still serves as a place of worship for a small Spanish congregation that's slowly restoring it to it's former glory, while at the same time trying to make the building more usable for the existing congregation with regards to sound. The old building intrigued me, and the fact that this was not a landmarked structure gave some flexibility as to what we could do. At the same time, no one wanted to modernize this beautiful structure with it's stained glass windows, oak pews, wonderful woodwork and magnificent arched cathedral ceilings which rose majestically to a height of thirty seven feet at the peak in the middle of the room. We simply wished to bring it into the twenty first century...

Vertical Panorama starting from rear stained glass windows to front organ loft

Before:
When I walked in and first took a look at what they were doing, their sound system consisted of a roll out rack filled with an equalizer, the requisite compressor limitor gate, crossover, and two QSC power amps. Signal inputs were managed by a 16 channel Yamaha mixer. A pair of Cerwin Vega Sub Woofers and two Gem Sound boxes loaded with double 15" woofers, a mid horn, and four piezo tweeters were stacked in the traditional left right speaker stack arrangement which failed to cover the half round sanctuary space evenly, and generally sounded pretty bad becuase these cabinets where not designed for high quality sound reproduction. They also had some of the drivers blown, so things were definitely not optimum.

  When they rolled the system rack out of storage the speaker cables lay strewn across the floor, crossing a path which was used for entry and which was in fact a fire exit, so this was a situation which needed to be corrected immediately.

  Power to the sound system was also inadequate, as it was power to the church itself, so we needed to upgrade the electrical service and the moment was taken advantage of to redo a great deal of the wiring at the same time.

  Finally, the microphone cables needed to be routed out of the way of the people who sang up front and frequently became entangled in the wires.

After:

Cerwin Vega Subwoofers

Since their main system was in fact working, and the problems with their sound mainly were due to the placement and type of speakers they where using, I suggested a central cluster to replace the mains they where using, and kept the Cerwin Vega Subs since they would be running musical instruments through the system and this was a project that did not have unlimited funding. These days not many projects do, so I often am called in to examin an existing system to determine what can be reused and what needs to go. As it was, all components in the main system's roll out rack were checked and found to be in good working order, so the main system was essentially reused intact. They had already developed a routine of rolling out the system, plugging in the microphone lines and speaker cables, plugging in their instruments and turning it on. It worked for them and the quality of the components were adequate for the job so there was really no reason to replace everything. Future plans for swapping their console with a soundcraft unit are in the works, but for now new equipment purchases where limited to four JBL EON 1500's, three Galaxy Sound Hot Spot Monitors, the stage pockets (see below) for the microphones, and the wire and hardware to connect everything and rig the speakers.

       Stage pockets with brass hardware and covers where installed as shown here, and all wiring was run under the floors to where the roll out equipment rack was placed during services. The speaker cables which created a trip hazard were alo run under floor to the same location for a cleaner, vastly improved look with much better cable management. Some of the wire runs, particularly those to the main central speaker cluster, took us into some parts of the building where no man had set foot in a hundred years....

The speaker cluster itself consisted of four of the aforementioned JBL EON 1500 cabinets with specially constructed hanging brackets and a custom built triangular frame made from aluminum extrusions of the sort that machine frames are constructed from. The frame is designed to shift all load bearing towards the front since there is only one major support beam up above that will hold the total weight of the speaker cluster and rigging frame and which is located where this needs to hang.

The load lift was accomplished using a combination of a chain hoist and scaffolding erected to provide access to the ceiling area above.

  

In addition to th four JBLs, two Galaxy Audio HotSpot^® monitors were suspended from below, which were modified by adding acoustic dampening material to the inside of the cabinet and installing an internal crossover that rolls off below 100HZ. These speakers will provide fill to the areas directly below and behind the cluster.

  

The speakers are shown here in their final resting position, before the wiring was neatened up and the rigging frame painted flat black to mask reflections and make the assembly less distracting...

We will be returning at regular intervals throughout the next six months and one final visit at the end of the year to check on the condition of the rigging and to adjust for any settling of the wood structure of the building itself.

This was a job that was challenging in that we needed to minimize the alterations to the building both in an esthetic and mechanical sense,the entire structure was hung with no more than four 1/2" holes drilled into the ceiling structure. Before and after sweeping of the room reveiled little change in the structures resonances so I don't believe we altered anythng much by drilling these four holes.

Finally, the areas of the church we were working in were interesting in how they revealed the inner workings of the building's acoustics.

Oh, and did I mention the contents of the bell tower? Up there, high in the sky, was the bell which was added after the fire that burned down much of the right side of the building. During reconstruction the bell tower and the entire reception hall which constituts the right half of the building where added. It was customary to have the date of the casting in the mold, so on the side of a bell which has been around since the civil war, we can still clearly read this: