Most modern churches invest substantially in creating welcoming lobby or foyer environments. Spacious layouts, lots of seating options, coffee bars, or cafes are all designed to make guests and regular attenders feel at home. This has almost become the standard over the years, and even churches with modest budgets have cracked “the comfortability code”. Along with appealing colors and regionally inspired décor, strategically-placed video displays entertain, educate, and inform congregants of upcoming events throughout the spaces. Of course all this would be incomplete without accompanying audio. Sounds simple enough, right? I wish it was, but the issue of how to manage lobby audio continues to plague church leadership and their members.
As with most of my content, the heart of the issue usually resides in church or tech leadership’s intentionality in implementing technology to achieve a specific goal. A huge part of that intentionality is communicating the vision to all the relevant teams. In the case of lobby audio; guest services, volunteers/staff, and AV tech teams have to work together within clearly defined parameters defined by leadership.
The overriding question on lobby audio is, what is its purpose for your ministry? Is the lobby an extension of what is happening in the worship auditorium? Or is it a stand alone environment?
I know a number of churches that maintain their lobbies completely separate from the worship auditorium. They do have video displays and audio throughout, but those elements do not feature content from the auditorium. This is not due to a lack of technology, but a desire for all Sunday attenders to actually go into the auditorium and participate in worship. These lobby environments are designed for community time, before and after the service and during the week, but not as a substitute for attending worship in the auditorium. I respect this vision, and from a technical standpoint this is the simplest method to execute. This style of isolated lobby audio/video is rarely a problem to establish and maintain.
Integrating audio and video from the auditorium into a lobby during worship is very popular. But executing it smoothly can be a challenge, and remains a source of frustration in many churches. It sounds simple enough to equip the lobby to essentially function as overflow for the auditorium. With current technology, the equipment is not the difficult part. Executing the process successfully is harder.
I worked with a church for a season, where the leadership was almost obsessive about the “lobby experience”. They wanted a high energy atmosphere from the moment you arrived on campus, until you left. The lobby speakers had to be loud, all the time, and when the service started, which was also routed to the audio/video in the lobby, it had to be even louder. All this was fairly easily accomplished technically, when in doubt, turn it up! The problem was that church leadership gave these directives to the AV department, but never bothered to get the guest services team on board. That team (made up largely of volunteers) was responsible for making sure guests were welcomed and made comfortable. They were constantly being bombarded by requests to please turn down the volume in the lobby. A compromise was reached and they installed a wall mounted volume control in the cafe, so the team could adjust the speaker volume when needed. But even this became a controversy. At one point they installed a plastic cover over the volume control, so that only a key-holder could access it. Ultimately someone got extremely frustrated and broke the plastic cover off altogether. The fact that someone resorted to vandalism, was another symptom of the cultural dysfunction within the leadership of that church. Many of these problems could have been avoided with better communication of the leadership’s vision to all the relevant teams.
For a church that has their lobby fully integrated to receive audio/video content from the auditorium, one of the major challenges is achieving and maintaining reasonable volume levels.
Not unlike broadcast, the issue that must be overcome is the substantial volume difference between the worship band playing and spoken word content. When I mix broadcast, I don’t want my online viewers to have to adjust their devices to account for our program variables. A very common scenario online; the service opens with 2 or 3 songs, followed by announcements or the sermon. During those songs you have your home device set to a nominal level. After the music, the pastor speaks but he’s not as loud as the music, so you turn your device up louder. Later, when the pastor is done, the band comes back, and you get blasted because you didn’t turn your device back down to accommodate the music. A good broadcast engineer will account for this by mixing spoken word content at a level commensurate to that of the band. Since many churches are feeding lobby audio directly from their FOH console, the disparity between the levels of spoken word and the worship band can be drastic. This can be remedied by using a matrix as a source from the FOH console to feed the lobby audio. Almost every modern digital console features matrices. Dedicate a matrix on the console to be your master feed to the lobby, then internally assign your main output to that matrix. This enables you to adjust the amount of level you send to the lobby independent of the auditorium. Decide what an adequate level is in the lobby while the worship band is playing. If you stop there, spoken word content will be too low in the lobby compared to the music. Any spoken word channels should be increased individually into the same matrix feeding the lobby, to compensate for the lower level those channels produce. I find that if you increase spoken word content on the lobby matrix to within 4 or 5 db of the worship band, the transition from worship to pastor will feel pretty natural. In an ideal situation, in lieu of current digital signal processing, and if leadership coordinates properly, you shouldn’t need a local physical volume control in the lobby. It just adds another variable, inviting unauthorized access.
Obviously there are other areas outside the lobby that require receiving content from the auditorium; cry rooms, nursing rooms, green rooms, and certain staff offices. These can all be fed from the same lobby matrix. However, in these smaller private spaces, I do recommend local volume control in each of them.
Some churches use their actual broadcast mix to feed lobbies and other spaces. This is a great solution, because presumably the broadcast engineer is already accounting for the changing levels of various elements within the service.
Lobby speakers are typically distributed throughout the space, sometimes suspended from high ceilings. Video displays are typically mounted on walls or suspended from the ceiling for convenient viewing. In some cases the physical distance between the video displays and the audio speakers will cause latency, a misalignment of the audio and video signals making them out-of-sync with each other. This can be corrected by delaying the audio feed to sync up with the corresponding video. Almost all modern digital consoles have a delay function that can be applied directly to the designated lobby (matrix) feed. Correcting latency issues can be a bit time consuming but well worth the effort to eliminate the distraction of out-of-sync video content.
Syncing video to audio, and balancing levels between spoken word and music content will take some time. In a new building or new system, you can’t assess how loud the lobby will feel until it is full of people. So it may take a few Sundays of trial and error to standardize your systems.
We want our lobbies to be live and vibrant, but often church builders overlook the need for acoustic treatments in these environments. A lack of acoustics in a lobby can exaggerate any of the problems we’ve discussed. In extreme cases, adding any amplified audio to a poorly designed lobby will only add to an already cacophonous mess. In this situation I would suggest getting an acoustic analysis, prior to investing in technology.
Above all, whether you decide to make your lobby an extension of the worship auditorium or a quiet respite from it, be intentional with your execution. Communicate the vision and directive to every team that will be affected by the decision and be patient as the process is fine tuned.
I’ve seen and heard some great solutions for lobby audio, and I’d love to hear how your church is doing in this area. Email me at rcochran@worshipfacility.com
Until next time, don’t forget to listen!
