Last month, we looked at a variety of location options for your house of worship mixing console. This month, we will investigate the all-important location and positioning of your FOH speakers.
As the house engineer, you, of course, want your board placed in the best location possible, but the congregation needs to hear well from any seat in the house. This brings us to your FOH speaker location (or locations).
Before we get any further into this, a note: I am not discussing line arrays here. In all but the really big churches, line arrays are uncommon and often a bad choice. We are talking old-school this time out.
Assume the Position
Typically, you will have two speaker boxes mounted one on each side of your worship house stage (platform). These speakers may be aimed or angled toward the congregation in hopes of supplying everyone with good sound.
Instead of speakers at the left and right of your stage, you may have a cluster of two or more speakers mounted above the stage at the center of the worship room. This second configuration is a little more old-school, but still exists in a lot of worship houses. (Sometimes you will have a center cluster in addition to your left and right. This is known as an L-C-R setup, and we'll cover it in a later column.)
Occasionally, speakers may be stacked on the left and right side of stage. I did an install in a church in Los Angeles and the pastor wanted to be able to easily move the speakers to an outreach location. So I created a ground stack array on either side of the stage made up of one subwoofer and two mid-high speaker boxes.
The placement of FOH speakers in your worship space is one of the most important factors in the overall sound quality and effectiveness of your system. Poor decisions in speaker enclosure placement can cause inadequate dispersion of sound and invite feedback. We will discuss several concepts that you should be aware of when considering speaker placement.
Guidelines:
Never place your speaker boxes behind the microphones. Sound waves emanating from the enclosures can be picked by the microphones and, as a result, will potentially produce massive feedback.
Be certain to raise your enclosures so that the high-frequency horns are above the congregation's heads while they are standing.
Never point the speaker boxes directly at the vertical back wall of your worship space because the reflecting sound can cause standing waves.
Flown or Stacked?
Your house speakers may be flown or stacked. Flown refers to speaker enclosures that are mounted to a wall or hanging from the ceiling.
Many enclosures are designed to be hung and incorporate fly-points. These points are where hooks are attached to the actual speaker box for the purpose of attaching other suspension cables, hooks, brackets etc. from the ceiling. Many manufacturers build brackets for their speaker boxes that allow them to be attached to a wall.
Whether attached to a wall or ceiling, you should always incorporate back-up safety cables to keep the speakers aloft in the event of an earthquake or fly-point failure.
And never never never try to fly boxes that do not incorporate fly-points. If you fly speakers that are not made for it, you are just begging for a speaker to fall and perhaps injure or even kill someone.
Stacked simply means placing the speakers on either side of the stage or adjacent floor. You may have single full-range boxes or stack them on a subwoofer. Whatever your configuration, the term refers to any speakers that are not flown.
To even distribution of sound waves and overall sound quality, it is very important to aim your speakers. It is usually easier to aim stacked enclosures than pointing flown boxes. Walking over to a stack of speakers and pushing them one way or another is certainly less of an ordeal than getting up to where the your flown speakers are – sometimes quite a distance off the floor – and pointing them.
Watch Where You Point That Thing!
Whatever your house system, a laser makes an excellent tool for determining where, exactly, your speaker enclosures will be directed. Place or attach the laser to the top, bottom or side of the speaker cabinet to see where it is pointed. When positioning the enclosure, aim the box so it projects into the congregation covering as many people as possible. Keep in mind that aiming your speaker enclosures just above the heads of the first row when standing will help produce ample dispersion over the entire congregation. However, since every worship room and every sound system is different, be prepared to experiment.
The typical horn in a speaker box has a horizontal coverage of 90 degrees and a vertical coverage of 40 degrees. If you know how to use a protractor (or get a volunteer from the congregation to help out), use it with your laser to figure out how much seating coverage your enclosure will provide. Understanding the sound projection of your speakers will give you an idea of what areas of your worship space are getting the best audio coverage. This may mean checking out the specs that came with your enclosures or going online and doing some research on how your speaker boxes disperse sound. As I mentioned last month, there will always be a sweet spot or two in your worship space, but properly-aimed boxes can make your entire room sound good. Once you have aimed your mid-high cabinets correctly, don't forget the subwoofers (if your house has them).
Low frequency enclosures are less directional than two-way and three-way enclosures, but the congregation can still hear their area orientation. So be sure to place them where their sound will evenly travel around the worship space. Whenever possible, subwoofers need to be placed on the floor in front or under the stage so they sound their best and prevent noise issues. (Placing them on the floor will also give you at least 3 dB more output.)
Should your stage be very resonant, a sub under it can cause some low frequency feedback or other problems. Once again, you will have to experiment. Also, just like FOH speakers, subs should not be placed behind your microphones. Due to the size of most subs; they should reside on a flat surface and not be flown. It's not that a sub can't be flown, but it is rare in most houses of worship. After you have placed your FOH speakers and subs (if you have them), get out into your worship space and use your ears. They should be the final tools you use to decide whether you have done a good job or not.
