Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church brought us in to help solve persistent speech intelligibility issues. Our role was to assess both the room acoustics and the audio system design – two factors that often overlap in complex ways. Through a combination of acoustic analysis, system modeling, and on-site measurements, we identified a critical issue: the original L-Acoustics line arrays were positioned in a way that created severe direct sound comb filtering in a key seating area, especially in the speech frequency range. We also uncovered strong first-order reflections that caused a perceieved shift in sound image coming from an incorrect direction. By redesigning the loudspeaker system and re-deploying, and strategically adding acoustic treatment, we resolved the intelligibility problems, leaving both the church and their lead audio technician more than satisfied with the outcome.
