ACS projects: Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Palatine, IL

A very much still-new church addition was made which lacked planning for practical use of the sound reinforcement system. The sound system controls were located in a small glassed-in room at the rear of the sanctuary. The room is entered from the foyer (rather than from the sanctuary). Becuase of its location, there was no easy way to adjust the controls during a service since you couldn't hear what was going on, let alone see the platform clearly.

A new sound booth was built inside the sanctuary by one of the church members who did a beautiful job of building the structure. Two new 32-channel Soundcraft mixers were installed--one for the FOH and the other for a separate record feed per the churches request. A few more wireless microphone systems and monitor feeds were installed as well.

The extreme sides of the sanctuary are slightly under a flat ceiling area such that people sitting on the outer limits are not covered by the previously installed Bose sound point-source system. The original installer put in a number of small in-ceiling fill speakers, but failed to use a signal delay to feed them. The result was a mess of sound when sitting on the sides. Several signal delay units were installed, and the problem was made better.

Acoustically, the room behaves well with the exception of the side parallel walls creating standing waves and a noisy HVAC system.

View from the FOH position in the new sound booth. Along the top of the mixer are two tape decks (one for playback only, one for recording only), as well as a CD player.

The old sound room is now the recording room. The glass window and location of this room made it impossible to adjust the sound system in the sanctuary properly. This room is also the location of the LynTech power sequence system which allows a single push of a button to turn the entire system on in the correct order. An "off" button allows the system to be turned off in the reverse order, thus eliminating any turn on transiet thumps and bumps.

The new sound booth at the rear of the sanctuary. Large enough for a couple people, built for expansion to add lighting and computer video control. (The window to the left and behind the booth is where the old sound room used to be. This room is now where they make recordings of the services and special events.)

This custom 1-in, 2-out 36 channel microphone splitter provides the audio feed from each platform input to the two separate mixers.

Pulling new mic cables....

New microphone and monitor lines run to the platform required some fancy conduit runs to get the jacks where they were needed. This photo shows the outside of the building at the platform end of the sanctuary. Running the cables outside eliminated more than (6) 90-degree turns and a number of other headaches.

This is the equipment rack along side the main FOH booth. This rack contains the power supply for the mixer as well as wireless microphone receivers. Since there's plenty of space, future storage racks for tapes and CD's could even be installed.

From the front of the sanctuary, the new sound booth doesn't stand out as an eyesore at all thanks to great placement and a great builder, Len W.

Our installers are happy to crawl through tiny holes in odd places so they can lay in a tiny cubbyhole for several hours as the other installers fish wires to them....! (The question isn't "how'd he get in there?", it's really "how'd he get out?"!