Now THAT'S a good PA

On Friday night we played a gig for the Bush Church Aid Society at St Barnabas' Anglican Church, which is on Broadway, just down from Sydney's Central Station. A historic church building, it was destroyed by fire six years ago. Our gig was the first official public event to be held in the new building.

Needless to say we were very keen to check out many aspects of the new building. It's an elegant design which draws you in off the busy Broadway. It's an accessible building - lifts, accessible doors, and clear entrances and exits. You're never in any doubt where to go - the building draws you in. And, of course, it's got much better fire safety than the old building!

But the thing we were most nervous to check out was the acoustics, and the installed sound system.

The verdict? Hats off to the good people of St Barnabas for one of the best sounding church sound systems I've ever heard. What you hear in the auditorium is exactly what it is meant to be: evenly distributed to every seat (no bright spots, or black spots), smooth across the frequency ranges, speech was very clear, and music was accurately reinforced coming off stage.

This is all the more impressive given the challenge of the room itself. A big space, with many oddly shaped reflective surfaces, we did fear a difficult environment. Contemporary music quickly becomes unbearably loud and unbalanced in a reverberant space (which is why most churches are better suited to classical, unamplified music). And certainly the space could be described as live - there is a decent reverb time which is noticeable on the snare hits - but it doesn't get out of control. The only challenge is the stage, which without carpets is definitely on the loud end. We brought extra carpets to soak up some of the sound, and wore earplugs on stage. Apparently during services the church musicians play using headphones to try to minimise on stage noise.

The three lessons I think should be learned from the hard working and wise wardens, staff and consultants on the Barney's project are these:

1. The church incorporated thinking about acoustics into the design stage. As a result, I suspect that some comrpomises were made to the architect's design (as a friend of mine puts it, architecture is a deaf science: you can't assume that they will have thought about, much less care about, acoustics. Bringing an acoustics consultant in early is imperative). Acoustics is the kind of thing that you have to get right before the concrete is poured, because it is notoriously hard to fix later.

2. The church was clear on its brief to the acoustics consultants. Many consultants come with strange ideas about what actually happens inside a contemporary church. One guy I spoke to was convinced that our youth group rock band would need nothing more than two choir mics. For a modern service the two priorities must be: (1) speech intelligibility,  and (2) ability to facilitate the type of music you actually have (a rock band is a very different proposition to a choir and needs very specific acoustics and equipment).

3. The church budgeted the sound system installation into the building project. Sound systems are often left off in the final stages of the project to cut costs in the short term - which ends up meaning a cheap and nasty system is installed which never works properly, hampers the ability for speech to be intelligible and music enjoyable, and requires constant bandaid repairs to keep it running. The error is made because it's usually the last thing to go in, and the easiest thing to say "we'll do that at a later stage". Of course, it never happens - once you've raised money for a building it's hard to turn around in 6 months time and ask for more. And this is a silly error, because hearing things is not an optional extra for a church building. I would have thought it's pretty core to our business (more so than carpeting, air conditioning, food preparation areas or aesthetics ... yes, even staff offices).

Good on Barney's for doing these things right! (Oh, and thanks for hosting the concert for Bush Church Aid!) You should be very proud of your new space. May God use it for the proclamation of his word (both spoken and sung) for many many years to come.