Getting It Right From the Start: Exit Church’s New Sanctuary

When you are building a new church or renovating a building for use as a church, it is easy to get caught up in the layout, the lighting, and the seating while completely forgetting about how the room will actually sound. The leadership team at Exit Church in Gas City, Indiana decided to handle things differently for their new sanctuary, which is currently being transformed from an old department store to a fully-equipped modern worship space. 

Instead of waiting until opening day to see how the room sounded, they worked with GearTechs early on to look at their blueprints. The initial room measurements showed a major issue: with space for 689 padded seats over a carpeted concrete floor, the untreated drywall and hard surfaces would cause reverberation for an uncomfortable 2.7 seconds along with echoes between parallel walls. That much reverberation makes the spoken word hard to understand and music quickly turns into a wall of noise.  With treatment, the listener should experience a reverberation time of about 1 second at 500 Hz, which allows the room some "life" and a good feel for music and for speech.   

An Affordable Solution with Acoustical Fulfillment

To fix this before a single panel was even installed, we teamed up with our partners at Acoustical Fulfillment to design a simple, effective layout for the space. The plan calls for 34 wall panels to absorb and diffuse reverberation and to stop echoes from bouncing side-to-side, along with 20 ceiling panels.

A lot of church boards assume that proper acoustic treatment is going to break the budget, but the entire materials package for this project came out to less than $15,000. For a room of this size, that is a completely reasonable investment that saves the church from retrofits down the road.

Why Planning Ahead Saves the Worship Experience

Taking this step during the construction phase is simply the right way to approach a project. Too many leadership teams assume that professional acoustic help is "too expensive," so they skip it or cut it from the budget—only to realize later that their new sound system is constantly fighting the building.

When the acoustics are handled correctly from day one, the sound system stops being a distraction, the message comes through clearly, and the overall worship experience is far more effective.

If you are currently working on a new build or a renovation, don't wait until the drywall is up to think about the audio. Contact the GearTechs team today, and let's take a look at your plans together.