Study Hall

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Church Sound: Inside Proper Booth Construction

Defining primary factors in locating and putting together the right solution for the church and tech team

Security: How Secure is Secure Enough?

If someone breaks into the church, they can/will break into the sound booth. Therefore, sound booth security should be based around securing the booth from “honest” people. Who are these “honest” people?

1. People who use the area outside of normal service times such as home school groups or weddings. They might assume they have free-reign if it’s not secured. Anyone using the sound booth should be properly trained. Therefore, train one or two adults from the home-school groups or have a call list of booth operators who are willing to work outside of Sunday mornings.

2. Youth group kids who think it would be cool to hook up their gaming console to the main screen on youth night. Again, not that it’s inherently bad but they should have a trained individual set up their systems for such usage. Images of a 32-ounce drink hovering over the mixer gives me nightmares.

3. Finally, the most dangerous of the “honest” people…kids. I know how “cool” it would be, as a kid, to sneak into the sound booth and play with the knobs and switches.It’s like this—If I get a phone call that the church was broken into, I’ll expect the sound booth is now missing a lot of equipment.

Outside of that, there is no reason to see signs of an untrained person in the booth such as mixer knobs in weird settings or equipment laying all over.

Secure your sound booth with a door lock. Then only provide trained people with keys. If you need to prevent hands from reaching over the booth, I suggest barbed wire…well, plexiglass is good, too.

Building The Booth

How big should the booth be? Much of this answer depends on how much space is available in your sanctuary and your needs. In our case, we had a 13-foot run across the back of the sanctuary that was ideal for a booth. We have operators for both the sound system and the multi-media presentations.

Therefore, we liked a very long booth design with about six feet in depth. Six feet sounds like a lot but it isn’t. You need a counter top big enough for a mixing board (around 28 inches). Then you need room for a comfortable swivel chair. Then you need room to move around. Bottom line is give yourself room—tape out a section on the floor and see if that gives you enough space.

There are now two basic types of booth to build; closed and open. A closed booth is one in which there is a large window opening that can be opened and closed as well as a lockable door. This is a lot of work to build and rather costly.

The pro’s are a secure environment for protecting your goods. The con’s are the openings have to be high enough to permit line-of-sight to the mains. Also, securable window closures are expensive.

An open booth has limited security but the trade-off is maximum visibility. Security was a big issue that was batted back and forth between myself and my cohort. We decided the open design was more aesthetically pleasing, significantly cheaper, and was a much better choice regarding line-of-site.

Summary

Designing a booth for your church requires consideration of four topics; line-of-site, location, security, and size. We found the open design sound booth with an elevated deck was ideal for our situation.

Remember a sound operator’s job is providing the best sound for the congregation. Having the right booth helps them do that job.

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