Cheap Fix for Church's Acoustical Problems

A local church recently moved into their new facilities. sanctuary is multi-purpose, with the permanent, and larger, sanctuary yet to be built. This multi-purpose space has a nice hardwood basketball court type flooring, a high ceiling and hard, flat, tall and parallel walls typical of multi-use space.

Like most similar spaces, the acoustics leave much room for improvement due in large part to sound bounce (reverberation). Sound from the speakers goes out nicely over the congregation, kits all of these nice hard surfaces and bounces (echos) all over the room. This echo greatly impacts the listening experience, making music less clear and vocals much harder to understand.

There are a number of solutions that will help remedy this, many of them quite expensive. I was quite intrigued by a number of posts on the internet talking about using Sonotubes(R) to diffuse sound to keep it from bouncing around. Sonotubes are not some magical acoustic treatment, they are the tubes contractors use as forms for pouring concrete pillars. Like a paper roll tube on steroids, these industrial grade cardboard tubes, when cut in half and mounted on the wall, diffuse the sound, scattering it instead of echoing it, greatly improving sound quality. Carefully cut in have and mounted to the wall, they look like architectural treatments. To see the concept, see www.jdbsound.com/work/art558.html.

While you can have an audio consultant come in and solve the problem, many churches have little money after a building program to spare, so here is the "poor man's" solution.

Get a number of Sonotubes (new not used) and carefully cut them down the middle. Typically you will use either the 18" or 24" tubes. Dress the cut edges so they are straight and smooth. Working from the pictures from the web site above, place the Sonotubes against the walls directly across the room from the stage area and on the sides as needed. What you are trying to do is to break up the large flat wall areas with the diffusers. One church I read about placed the tubes on boards and leaned the boards against the walls, moving them around and experimenting to get the best sound. Once you know the location and spacing, then the church can permanently mount them to the wall, usually flush to the wall. Paint the tubes the same color as the wall and voilla, instant sound improvement and architectural treatment! It was even suggested by a friend that you could put lights in them like a large wall sconce to provide indirect lighting.

That said, the best way to solve these types of acoustical problems is to avoid them in the first place by getting an Audio/Visual engineer involved during the design process. However, if you have already built and need an inexpensive solution, this may work the trick.




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God is a God of Order

The scriptures say that God is not the author of confusion. I had the pleasure of presenting the results of my needs and feasibility study today to a congregation that has needed to build for several years. In analyzing church and Sunday school attendance, it was apparent that this church had "hit the ceiling" several times on capacity over the past 10 years and then dropped back in attendance, always oscillating up and down past their maximum sustainable limit.

Conventional building and church growth wisdom tell us that a church is effectively full when it is at 80% of capacity, and this church certainly bore that out, with Sunday school at 80% of capacity, sanctuary seating at 85% and parking at 80%, the church just could not grow. The church knew they needed to do something, but was split almost 50-50 on how to address the question.

Enter the church building consultant. Within 90 days, the pertinent data on attendance, finances, land and ministry needs was collected and analyzed along with information that came out of personal interviews, congregational and community surveys and demographic studies. In the final analysis, neither of the two proposed solutions would have provided any long term growth to the church. This was not the fault of the church, for they had no real experience or training that would have equipped them for this work. They did not have was the experience to understand the proper questions to ask and to then evaluation the answers in a manner that would indicate the proper building strategy.

Knowing what process to follow, what questions to ask and what the answers mean brought the church from disorder to order, with a firm and sensible plan for the future, in just 3 months and will equip this ministry to make a greater impact on their area and win more souls for the kingdom. If you don't have this type of expertise in your church (and few do), there is no shame in getting some outside counsel; after all both Moses and Solomon got outside, expert help for their building program.



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