Oxnard, CA (June 4, 2012)—New Life Community Church recently took over a 50,000-square-foot industrial space as its new home. While the facility has a new audio system that includes Allen & Heath FOH and monitor consoles and L-Acoustics line arrays, it also sports 51 custom Elite ProPanels from Auralex Acoustics.
Richard Rutherford of Rutherford Design was involved in the design process, which allowed him to suggest some basic acoustical layouts throughout the space to help with speech intelligibility. The two main walls are not parallel and the entrance hallway and doorways are slightly offset, even though they look symmetrical. Also, the rear main wall is not a straight line; it actually curves. These small architectural details, in terms of non-parallel walls and entrances, naturally help to redirect reflections and sound energy.
“In a house of worship, I’m concerned more with the peripheral seats and the back half of the room,” says Rutherford. “To communicate with those people intimately, the spoken word in this kind of environment needs a high level of intelligibility. In a space like this, regardless of the budget or loudness of the audio system, if you have a six-, seven- or eight-second overall reverb time, there’s just no way it’s going to be intelligible.”
Rutherford installed Elite ProPanels on the walls around the 900-seat sanctuary worship area, as well as 21 custom ProBaffles mounted above the light fixtures. “The layout of the ceiling gave us an opportunity to do a fairly symmetrical array of hanging flags to baffle the low-mid frequencies getting toward the back of the room,” said Rutherford. “The room now sits at about a second-and-a-half reverb, and it sounds great, regardless of where you are sitting in the sanctuary.”
Auralex Acoustics, Inc.
www.auralex.com
