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Church and H.O.W. – Forums for HOW Sound and AV - Your Displayed Name Must Be Your Real Full Name To Post In The Church and HOW Forums => H.O.W. AV Archive => Topic started by: Phil Spreadbury on October 12, 2006, 01:37:17 PM
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Hey all,
working on designs for a brand new facility to house our student ministry. What do you suggest as a minimum ceiling height for our main meeting room? The ceiling will be "open" and probably painted black. The underside of the supporting structure for the roof will be about four feet below the actual roof.
This will be a room that seats about 700. Our singing will usually be led by a band (high SPL's) and we'll use a lot of video. One screen each side of the stage. We'd like to be able to host concerts etc. Also looking to incorporate about ten intelligent lights.
My concerns are primarily with acoustics, flying speakers and lighting.
phil
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That depends on many things including the type of services and events, the shape of the room, sightlines, what all is on stage, whether you have any rigging, the budget and many more.
In a traditional music performance space the volume is critical for acoustics, but as you move away from natural reinforcement from the room and towards the audio systems providing all the reinforcement then this becomes less critical. In cases where there is high SPL audio but congregational interaction is important a very high ceiling may be counterproductive.
Quite often there is difficulty fitting appropriately sized video screens, so that may be a good place to start looking. People often forget that you need to account for the stage height plus the height of the performers and set pieces and then some room to make sure rigging, lights, speakers, etc. clear the screen along with the height of the screen itself. This often defines a minimum desired height at the stage.
Construction budget will obviously also be a big factor. Taller spaces can be expensive to build and maintain.
Hopefully whomever is designing the systems will work with your Architect to help on this.
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I typicaly call out church screen heights to be 1/10 to 1/12th the distance to the LFV (least faviroable viewer (guy at the back of th the room)). Add the distance that you want the bottom of the screen from the floor (probaly > 6') and you have your mininum ceiling height.