In spite of the fact that the sound system appeared to be properly designed and installed, this sanctuary had a problem with speech intelligibility. Part of the challenge was that the client did not want to sacrifice the sound of music in the sanctuary for the sake of speech intelligibility.

Model studies were very useful for investigating loudspeaker location and the sound-system spectrum to optimize speech intelligibility. I used my acoustical measurements of the sanctuary to construct a model with similar acoustical characteristics. I used this model to investigate how to improve intelligibility, without sacrificing musical ambiance.

Results of these model investigations can be heard in the sound files below.

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