Best speakers for Hauptwerk church installation

[Hohl Flute]

Does anyone have any experience/advice on the best speakers for a Hauptwerk church installation? I'm looking at a small - moderate sized sample set so no need to reproduce 32' Open pipes. I'm wondering about bi-polar, such as Marshall and Ogletree use. Any thoughts much appreciated.

[jbird604]

I'd offer that it's going to depend greatly on the details of the setup. Bi-pole speakers of necessity have open backs, with the speaker cones radiating equally in both directions. Therefore, there will be a steep cut-off point for bass output, as the rear wave will cancel the front wave below that cut-off point, defined by the dimensions of the box that holds the speakers. So you would surely need a separate sub-woofer system for the bass, and leave the bi-pole units to project mids and highs only.

Bi-pole units are probably perfect for a situation where the speakers can be mounted right out in the open, with plenty of distance between the rear of the box and the nearest wall. Otherwise, the rear output will simply get reflected and mixed with the front output, though altered in phase and timing, thus possibly contributing to some distortion or frequency response irregularities. That is why such speakers are not right for many church setups. If the speakers are to be placed in chambers, or in a balcony or gallery, or anywhere else that isn't fully out in the open, you might be better served with more conventional units.

My organ installation experience is only with conventional digital organs, not VPOs, and the needs are a little different. A VPO functions by attempting to project a believable stereo image of the organ it is reproducing, so the speakers must be placed in such a way that the listeners can perceive this stereo sound field. That must require some creative placement. In a home it isn't so hard, as the primary listener is probably the person on the bench, so placing speakers to the left and right, more or less directed at the ears of the player, will yield the desired stereo image.

But for a church installation to work, you'd think the speakers must be placed in such a way that listeners seated all over the room, at various distances and angles from the speaker array, will still be able to get a sense of the stereo image being projected. One way to do that might be to have speakers on the left and right walls, mounted fairly high up, pointed directly across the chancel and/or nave, aimed toward the corresponding speaker on the other side. Thus, a listener standing at any point between the two might hear a fairly good balance of the two, as the one he is closest to will also be the one at the most severe angle away from his ears, while the one on the opposite side is further away but less severely angled away from his ears.

To set up a system like that, you might want to use some high quality standard speaker cabinets such as Allen HC-15s, possibly augmenting each one with a few PP speakers. But then, there could be reasons why that won't work, especially if the church requires the speakers to be fairly invisible.

Surely one of the experts in this field will chime in and give you some guidance.

[lilgrey5102]

Sorry to resurrect an old post, but it's very interesting to me.
I'd like to create a surround sound in my home, but I'm super overwhelmed at trying to figure it all out.

Is it fairly DIY doable to create a surround sound with different divisions coming from different parts of the room?
I'd love to have the solo trumpet from the Johannus or swell to come in from the back of the living room!

[John Kinkennon]

My experience has been with small to moderate size sanctuaries where multichannel with 8 or 12 studio monitors has worked very well. I do keep the stereo pairs for the benefit of having two speakers in two different phase relationships for each tone. So with 12 speakers that's six stereo pairs. We have budget friendly Behringers at a couple of locations and highly modified Allen's (horns and new midrange) at another. The finest setup I've heard bar none was in a room large enough to be a small sanctuary where there were 8 Adam AX7's with a pair of 18" Rythmik Audio subs. That's a set of speakers approaching $10k so they had better sound good. I like ribbon tweeters a lot like I have on my own discontinued Behringers. Adam makes an affordable 7" studio monitor with a ribbon tweeter ($250 or so versus $750 for the AX7). Haven't heard this model though.

Do invest in a quality sub whether or not you need the 32' sounds. I am partial to Rythmik Audio -- again what I have at home. I like to route all the pedal division to a sub plus a pair of full range speakers, typically the same model as the front speakers though this is not crucial.

EDIT: Having said all this I once loaned my PA speakers (15" w/ horns) to a church until they could get their own speakers. They sounded fantastic in a small A-frame space, so don't hesitate to try the speakers you may already own.

[Horseshoe_or]

Distortion can be a problem, especially with big reeds. Many speakers can handle them until you do a big registration with the expression pedal fully open. I have had good outcomes with three-way speakers but even then, I have not been able to raise the volume of some reeds as high as I might like in Hauptwerk. You will need to experiment.