This is a beautiful old building with the sanctuary shaped like an "L". The first photo below was shot from the rear of the sanctuary toward the front (facing the front of the platform). There are a few rows of pews off on the left hand side. The seating on the right hand side is nearly identical to that of the main seating area.

This is not a bad sounding room, but there are some problems. The side walls in both seating areas are parallel which cause some flutter echoes and supports standing waves. The seating area in the middle area (which is about the first 10 rows of pews or so) has the disadvantage of not having any nearby surfaces to reflect sound (which would provide early reflections which are conducive to congregational singing and intelligibility). After talking with church members, they agree that those people sitting in this central area are seen to sing less and not be quite as involved as those seated farther back or in the side areas. (This is a perfect example of what can happen when a room is used by width rather than by length--congregational singing suffers, among other things.)

One other issue with the design of the sanctuary is that people seated in the rear pews at either end of the "L" can't see each other. Thus, the congregation is split, just by the shape of the sanctuary. Worse yet, there's no way to get from one end to the other unless you walk through the sanctuary. In addition (yes, there's more!) the church has a main enterance at both ends. So, depending on where someone parks their car, they may never see or talk to people who are at the opposite side of the church. (OK, they know they have this problem, so this isn't anything new.)

The photo below is a shot from the rear of the room, but turned toward the other side room (the other part of the "L").

One issue with the organ is that originally, the pipes were all behind the screened in area behind the platform. Later on, more pipes were added in front of the screened chamber since there wasn't room for them in the chamber. This results in the front pipes being louder than the rear pipes. Again, this is something they're well aware of and know is an issue.

Notice the speaker cluster; this was installed many years ago and is still performing very well (with the exception of a possible driver failure in one or two boxes). The design is very good--the front cluster consists of three speakers, one for each section of seating. They could have been spread out a bit, and if this had been done, the delay speaker in the other portion of the "L" wouldn't have been needed at all. Also, the current connections are such that the center speaker is wired to one amplifier channel while the two side speakers are wired together. These should be separate since each covers a different sized seating area (the one on the left is covering less seats than the one on the right).

The controls for the sound system are located at the rear of the sanctuary in a very nicely designed booth which also includes lighting and video controls. (It would be best to have the video controls outside the sanctuary to help reduce the noise level.)

This photo (below) shows the rear of the room (and control area on the right). Notice the small balcony. Also, notice another small detail at the bottom of the photo--theater type seating, but with a solid single-piece pewback! This is something that's rather rare for the most part, but we were told was rather common for the area churches to have.

Overall, this isn't a bad room. The sound system isn't bad either. Both could stand a number of changes and upgrades, but considering the age of the building and system, it's not bad at all. As was stated earlier, there are some seating areas that are better than others (for both listening and for congregational singing), and sight lines from the side seating area take a little getting used to.