in this old church wasn ’ t always a simple task , though . When built in 1893 , obviously there wasn ’ t much consideration given to getting a lift into the building one day . “ Plus , you have a sloped floor , so you can ’ t use a typical Skyjack or something , because they don ’ t do well on slopes . We found this bizarre German lift that would fit in the door , and it had to turn a corner to get into the sanctuary , and it was just long enough to reach the heights we needed ,” Jukes remembers .
By improving the room acoustics , the classic pipe organ now has a richer bass sound . So much so that Jukes says they now get an extra octave of bass out of the pipes . “ One thing I ’ ve realized is that the rose window , which is opposite the organ , should be about the diameter of the longest pipe . So , if you have a 16-ft . pipe on an organ , you should have about a 16-ft . rose window ,” he adds . “ There , the rose window is about 12 ft ., so it was undersized for the size of the organ . Turns out , historically , the organ was put in after the church was built . In this case , though , they have a stained-glass ceiling , so it wasn ’ t as much of an issue . But we do have much cleaner and deeper bass with the organ , which is kind of cool . And again , that comes back to the standing waves and the bass frequencies being
cleaner . They flow without being impeded because there ’ s no standing waves .”
The other benefit , particularly in spaces like churches where large , obtrusive speakers are not wanted , is that by creating more low-end clarity , you can get away with a smaller sound system . In this case , there ’ s just one double-12-in . KV2 EX2.2 active sub mounted on the ceiling . Jukes says this gives a more hi-fi , studio-quality sound rather than compromising the bass response by placing the subwoofer on the floor or under the stage . He attests that “ this system can shake the floor just as well as any system with subs on the floor .”
“ That gave us more gain-before-feedback there , too , as often you ’ ll get bass resonance by putting your sub under the stage . So , you ’ re actually working against yourself ,” he adds . “ The other thing is better signal-tonoise . We ’ ve probably gained 10dB of signalto-noise just in the room , acoustically . You don ’ t hear the sound of the air conditioning or heat , so the noise floor is much lower . It ’ s really interesting – there ’ s multiple things that happen when you treat the acoustics of the space . Other things that can be distracting kind of disappear and you can hear what ’ s going on . The sound system becomes clearer because of the acoustical treatment , and hence it ’ s a smaller sound system .”
The rest of that new compact design is a hybrid mono-stereo system that works on a matrix to give the full range of sound to everyone in the room . Because of the wraparound balcony and cross-like shape of the room , which has capacity for roughly 500 people , it ’ s a difficult space to cover . What Jukes drew up is a centre vocal cluster that is hung about 30 ft . above the stage . That cluster , in addition to the EX2.2 sub , has three KV2 EX10 speakers , which are very compact 10-in ., two-way full-range active speakers .
Getting permission to hang a centre cluster was a bit of a battle , according to Jukes , because the church leaders were worried it would distract or obstruct views of the pipe organ . “ Since I went with smaller speakers and I could hang it higher and then they realized , when you sit in the pews and you look at the organ , the speakers actually appear to be higher than the organ even though they ’ re directly in front of it . It was a bit of a fight to do a cluster and now it ’ s a non-issue .”
One other unique thing the team did was design and fabricate the central cluster bracket so that it could be winched up into place . The winch is 15 ft . above the ceiling and 55 ft . from the floor . “ We assembled
40 PROFESSIONAL SOUND