St. John's Church in the Lebanese city of Achkout, 15 kilometres north of Beirut, has recently had a brand new sound system installed. With seating for 750 and a maximum capacity of 1,000, St. John's is one of the largest Christian churches in the area.

Installer Tony Abou-Khair outlines the brief: "In terms of speech intelligibility, the old system was not capable of doing justice to the demands of today. As an ever-increasing number of people have been frequenting the services, the sound system had to be expanded. The budget was tight so the loudspeaker cabinets we chose had to be capable of producing a balanced sound with excellent speech intelligibility, even without any type of external controller. As a result, we opted for the HK Audio Linear 3 Series. The acoustics in the front portion of the church are problematic because of a potentially unpleasant build-up of mid to high frequency reflections; thanks to the cabinets' integral Sound Field Selector (an internal HF-damping), we were able to keep these under control without even having to resort to any external EQ." The church is divided into three zones and covered with six LR 112 cabinets mounted to the side walls, with HK Audio BWH 3 wall-mount adapters.

(Ruth Rossington)


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