When Emmanuel Chin Baptist Church broke ground on a new multi-purpose worship center, Living Sound was brought in from the earliest planning stages — working alongside the church’s leadership from design through final commissioning to build a flexible space that would support worship and a range of church activities beyond Sunday services, without asking the sound to be an afterthought.
The Challenge: A Room Built for Flexibility Fights Against Clarity
A gym-style, multi-purpose room is a demanding acoustic environment. Hard, parallel surfaces and a large open volume make a space flexible, but they also make it reflective and reverberant — working against the clarity a worship service depends on. Getting the sermon and the Praise Team both to read clearly, in a room built for flexibility rather than acoustics, was the central design problem from day one.
Why a Standard Speaker Install Wasn’t Enough
In a reflective, reverberant room, simply installing a more powerful sound system doesn’t solve the underlying problem — it can make it worse, pushing more energy into a space that already reflects and blurs sound. Coverage and clarity in a room like this depend as much on how the room itself behaves as on how loud or capable the speakers are. Recognizing that early meant the sound system and the space’s acoustic treatment couldn’t be designed as separate decisions — they had to be solved together.
Living Sound’s Approach
Living Sound designed the sound system’s coverage and the space’s acoustic treatment side by side, sizing and positioning the system for the room’s specific geometry and reflective character while considering where and how much acoustic treatment the space needed — rather than installing a system first and treating the room as an afterthought.
Acoustic Treatment: Solving the Room, Not Just Adding Speakers
This is one of the more important engineering decisions on this project, not an afterthought. Because the gym-style room’s reflective character was the central acoustic challenge, Living Sound didn’t try to overcome it with speaker power alone. Acoustic treatment was planned into the project from the same early stage as the sound system itself — Living Sound considered the location and amount of treatment the space needed and designed and installed it alongside the speaker coverage plan. The system was then tuned and calibrated in the finished room, so the treatment and the electronics were optimized together against the same acoustic problem.
Integrated System Design
The resulting system brings five areas together: a line array and subwoofer system sized for full-room coverage (JBL SRX910LA line array with SRX918SF subwoofers), digital mixing and speaker management (dbx DriveRack VENU360 with a Behringer X32 Compact console), PTZ video and broadcast switching (PTZ cameras through a Blackmagic Design switching and routing chain), a lighting rig that supports both worship and event-style production, and Living Sound’s own EasyDrive Integrated Control System tying the four together. Equipment choices here exist to support that design intent — coverage matched to a reflective room, working alongside acoustic treatment — rather than being the story on their own.
Integrated Control for Day-to-Day Operation
A highlight of this project is how much of the system comes together under Living Sound’s own EasyDrive Integrated Control System. Rather than separate control surfaces for sound, cameras, screens, and lighting, EasyDrive lets the church’s volunteer media team recall line array and mixer presets, PTZ camera positions, screen content, and lighting looks from one unified workflow. For a ministry that depends on volunteers rather than paid technical staff, that kind of simplified, one-touch operation makes running a full-scale production sustainable week after week.
Commissioning and First Worship
Ahead of the church’s dedication service, the Living Sound team stayed on site to tune the system: dialing in DSP settings, calibrating the line array and subwoofers to the room, and validating the result through a live worship setting rather than relying on measurements alone. Alongside that tuning work, the team trained the church’s volunteer media team on operating the new system day to day, so the ministry wasn’t left dependent on Living Sound for routine Sunday operation.
The Result
In the dedication service — with Praise Team and choir both in the room — the system delivered a sound that was full and clear, with strong speech intelligibility for the spoken parts of the service, and sound that remained consistent from the front through the middle and rear seating areas rather than favoring one part of the room. That outcome is the direct payoff of treating the acoustic challenge as a design problem from the start, rather than trying to solve a reflective room with speaker power alone. Members of the congregation and visitors attending the dedication responded warmly to the new space and its sound.
Services Provided
Church Audio System Design · New Worship Center AVL Installation · DSP Tuning & Speaker Calibration · Acoustic Treatment Design · Integrated Control System (EasyDrive) Programming · Live Worship Sound Support · Volunteer Media Team Training
Related Services
Explore more of how Living Sound can support your ministry: Church AV Installation & Upgrade and Church Audio Consultation.