Corpus Christi, TX
In over 30 years of acoustical design and integration, Church of Hope was the second most challenging facility to correct acoustically. After our acoustic treatment the room sounds better than Carnegie Hall!
Ken Parks
Located in the coastal Texas town of Corpus Christi, the Church of Hope facility started out as a typical A-frame 200 seat sanctuary which overtime expanded into an add on facility seating approximately 1000. The expanded sanctuary was designed to be 158 feet wide with a depth of 58 feet from back of stage to rear wall and a ceiling height of 18 to 22 feet with a 5 degree floor slope. The rear wall was designed as a semi circle from left to right on two planes, floor to 8 feet and then the upper plane 8 to 18 feet with the upper plane extruded 5 feet into the sanctuary. The walls were constructed of 5/8″ gypsum on metal and wood studs with little to no insulation inside the walls.
The design on the sanctuary created a nightmare of reverberation, echoes and flutter echoes completely destroying the intelligibility of the music and spoken word leaving the congregants guessing as to what the pastor was teaching. As with many church facilities, the aesthetics, i.e. the look of the room, was first priority over the actual function of the room which is to communicate.
The Design Plan
Detailed measurements of the whole room were taken using lasers and graph paper then transferred to EASE software to create a 3-D CAD drawing of the room. EASE is the industry standard software for room analysis and acoustic correction. The results of the EASE 3-D model revealed that the room has a reverberation time of 8.2 seconds from 250 Hz to 500Hz, multiple echoes at 2.2kHz to 3.6 kHz from stage to rear wall with 12 distinct pings per second. The parallel side walls 158 feet a part produced additional 4 pings per second at 1 kHz to 2.7kHz.
The Elite Pro Audio staff and associates determined that the proper way to correct the room was to install custom made diffusers constructed out of 1/2″ Baltic plywood with additional 2′ fiberglass core for trapping 250 Hz -500 Hz frequencies. Thirty two of the 8′ x 4′ panels were strategically placed on the upper plane of the back wall and with an additional 8 panels placed on the front diagonal left and right walls.
Whisperwall treatment was placed on the side parallel walls to absorb the standing waves and side to side pingings.
Results
Once the panels were set in place. the room now has a reverberation time of 0.3 seconds at 250 -500 Hz, 0.8 seconds at 4.2 kHz with no echoes or pings. With tears in his eyes, Pastor Rod Young’s responsed “After 20 years of battling this room, I never could imagine it would sound this good…it’s now a completely relaxed environment!