I walked in during the prelude. A choir from Dallas was singing a cappella
from the loft above the entrance at the rear of the nave. The 8 (?) second
reverb in that place sucked up all the transients and fast moving passages.
I thought, "How in the world am I going to understand a word of the service
from 100' back?"

On the columns right and left of the front were 4 line arrays. I couldn't
see the speaker size, but the covers were about a foot wide and 17 feet
tall. Two faced down the nave, the other two face out left and right to the
transcepts.

The mics were rolled off high in the midrange, I'm guessing nothing below
about 400 Hz got through, with about a 4K peak. As long as the speaking
person didn't pounce on the mic, everything was excellently clear and
understandable.

Someone put some effort into that system.

Carey Carlan wrote:

Someone put some effort into that system.

The guy that did most of the design work on the system also works the
Washington Folk Festival with Mike Rivers and me.

There is some propaganda at http://www.acousticdimensions.com/profiles/wnc.htm
although it's short on technical information about the array patterns and
how they managed to decide on the directivity control methods.

Unfortunately they don't have an outdoor system that they can set up to
feed from the house board, which was a great disappointment to the many
thousands of people who showed up for Reagan's funeral and could not get
inside. Doing that with fairly restricted range would not be all that
difficult.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."