Acoustics and visual aesthetics frequently collide in churches with older buildings and traditional architecture, where liturgical worship styles are often the norm.

The St. Mary’s Episcopal sanctuary, with arrows pointing to the subtle location of the new loudspeakers.

Here, clergy and worshippers prefer their loudspeakers to be highly intelligible yet essentially invisible—unlike the situation in newer worship centers where loudspeakers in open view rarely raise objections. At St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in El Dorado, Arkansas, potential conflicts between acoustics and aesthetics were resolved by the installation of a discreet, self-powered loudspeaker system from Meyer.

“The criteria we were given required the greatest possible intelligibility from the system but with no speakers visible,” recalls Brad Daigle, the system designer and owner of MSC Systems in Beaumont, Texas. “That kind of made me scratch my head and say, ‘Now that we’re talking the impossible, where do we go from here?’”

Another look at the new loudspeakers, this time during the installation process.

Though the long and narrow church seats only about 250 people, high ceilings and hard surfaces make the room quite reverberant. The church’s former sound system, described by church rector Fr. Robert Allen as “gravely inadequate”, consisted of a single two-way loudspeaker hung in the center, just in front of the pulpit. That meant that nearly a third of the church (the sanctuary altar area) had no coverage, while coverage in the middle was spotty and intelligibility fell off rapidly at the rear. “I was told they were getting the standard complaint: ‘We can hear fine but we can’t understand a thing,’” remarks Daigle.

He designed a three-zone delay system referenced to the front most loudspeakers, a pair of UPM-2P Ultra Compact loudspeakers tucked in the corners below the organ pipes. Two delayed UPA-2P Compact Narrow Coverage loudspeakers are nestled in a corner of the rafters on each side of the chancel arch, and a third pair of speakers (UPM-2Ps) maintains consistent coverage to the rear most pews. The identical tight coverage patterns of the loudspeakers (45 x 45 degrees) enabled Daigle to “spotlight” coverage and avoid splash off the walls, even with the loudspeakers at full ceiling height.

Although the church now has six loudspeakers instead of one, the system is actually less obtrusive than the old one. With the compact, black loudspeakers tucked deep in the shadows, the parishioners now enjoy crisp, clear sound from a system that otherwise calls no attention to itself. “The speakers are in plain view if you look for them, but they really are not noticeable,” says Fr. Allen. “They blend nicely into the shadows.”

The pulpit complete with new microphone.

Dale Boothman of MSC Sound handled project and sales coordination for the new system at St. Mary’s, with installation supervised by Cavin Carter. Other key system components include an Allen & Heath DL1000 digital mixer, two Shure UT14/84 wireless lavalier microphones and a Crown LM300AL pulpit microphone.

After an initial shakedown period, which included some repositioning of the wireless receivers and getting the volunteer operators up to speed on use of a digital console, the new system at St. Mary’s is now making a clear difference. “It’s vastly better than the old system, “ according to Fr. Allen, and Brad Daigle is similarly pleased with the outcome of his ‘impossible’ task.

“It’s a very natural sound, even with the speakers up so high,” he says. “It sounds like somebody is speaking directly to you, rather than, ‘Oh, I’m hearing this through a sound system.’”