" If you put a person on stage without a mic and he shouts back at you, can you understand what he's saying?"

oooo, that's a good one. Take the whole PA out of the mix and listen to see if its the room.

Of course it doesn't take speaker placement into account, not unless you hang the 'shouter' up where the cluster is! LOL

bhendrix:

Hi Chuck,

The first thing we're going to work on is the rear window reflection in the sanctuary.  When we listen over headphones, the vocals are clear and understandable, so this seems to be a room issue.  The next step will be to use the KP-600s by themselves without the overhead center cluster.  I still have some work to do to get the 600's up and running.  Waiting for amps and EQ settings.

Bill,

I suspect your problems are related to the natural reverb of the room and not the signal processing.  Especially if the master mix through headphones is acceptable.  Major suspects are the brick and glass which both have low absorbtion coefficients.  Parallel walls are terrible on top of this. Your flutter echo in the ceiling area above the curtains is probably ringing.  A little wall treatment will improve the situation greatly.  You can think of foam as an open window for sound.  Once it hits the foam it does not reflect.

For the sound mix you best speaker cluster for a reverb free mix is probably the center cluster hanging.  This is because it is more optimized for angles of the room.  If you were to trace the rays of acoustics the stage speaker being parallel to the floor would radiate to the back wall and then reflect to the front parallel wall.  The hanging speaker might project to the back wall but at a skewed angle which would then bounce to the floor and congregation.  People absorb sound well, thus it will be better in a full house.

May I make this suggestion?  If possible mix the vocals to mono and send them through the center cluster only.  I am flying blind because I don't know the SPL mapping of each speaker cluster on the floor but the rear of the room would probably sound better with mono center only.  You can then mix the instrument to the L/R stacks.  Secondarily loud acoustic instruments could be contained in a plexiglass iso chamber. (drums are the main culpret)  This would help to avoid fader creep from sound spilling over from the stage. 

"May I make this suggestion?  If possible mix the vocals to mono and send them through the center cluster only."

I'm glad to see someone finally repeated what I said in the very first reply on this thread.

 Or you could mix the vocals to mono and route them through the center cluster only. 

The music can stick to your ribs, The sound system should be transparent.  The definition of distortion is some charactoristic of the component that alters the signal as it passed from input to output.  It should be about the music and not about the technology. My idea is that even if the music is controlled or shaped it should appear as if it is not.

 Not to be taken literally, just a tongue-in-cheek artistic statement.

Read: no thin, wimpy sound- I want sound with balls! How's that?

colterphoto1:

I don't think the KP600's are your answer. Plus I think they'd look pretty oppressive in there.