Our stage area:
Some of the things there belong to a business that leases some space during the week. The clavinova is under that blue cover on right. It's usually against the wall when not in use and there are some Amps on stage that don't belong to us. The table behind the drums was a communion table but is currently hiding our Amps. There is another window to the left of the cross that completes a symmetric set of 3 in that wall. I could hang the speakers from the roof beam in from of the stage but then, it would be a prohibitive job to retrieve them for use in say an outdoor event. We have 4 foldback wedges but only use 2 so in theory could use the 4 to run FOH and FB in such events but the sound is not nearly as good the our current FOH speakers on left. I could hang the speakers on the wall above where they are and they would still be reasonably accessible there but feedback is limiting there. That wall with the 3 windows is a short wall in a rectangular room and has a certain design symmetry to it. This is already broken up to some extent by the screen, projector and stage. I am reluctant to propose making this worse. The room is rectangular and the 3 windows wall is the short wall. The opposite wall has a kitchen servery building entry and rest rooms, so we can't put the stage that way. The best thing I have come up with would move the stage area to the centre of the 3 windows, put heavy drapes each side of the windows so these can close over the windows, mount a speaker on a short wall on each side of the stage and run a curtain track (like hospital curtains track) from the short wall to the stage front and then along the sides of the stage to the wall behind it. This would allow us to open up the end of the room when we needed to but deploy curtaining to deaden reflections and dissipate FOH sound from influencing the stage area and reduce foldback from being reflected forward to the house. However I am not an acoustic engineer so I don't really know how well it may or may not work. It would be an expensive undertaking for us with unknown outcomes. We don't have any religious tradition issues rearranging furniture, just the cost and work for an unknown outcome. I kind of like the speaker in short wall idea because it makes them less obtrusive and we could hide a permanent ladder, speaker lifting tackle and retracted curtaining behind the wall. Might be good acoustically too.
If that is understandable, how does it sound?
Ken