View Full Version : setting up audio system in church - please help


vitaliygoretoy
06-10-08, 02:34 AM
Hi everybody,

I desparately need some help, I have no idea what I should do here.

We have a church that we purchased. It already has speakers everywhere and we'd like to be able to use these. We have our own speakers from before but we think we can make better use of the church's already built in speakers. All the speakers look like they have been custom made with custom enclosures.

Main question I have is what is the best way to connect all of these to our mixer/controller? I have an old Onkyo receiver that I was thinking of connecting all of them to and than connecting the mixer's outputs to one of the receiver's inputs. Would this work well? The receiver probably won't be able to use all the power of the speakers, is there a way we can utilize them more for better/clearer/crisper sound?

Here is a quick sketch of the room and location of speakers, sorry it looks so crappy. The black boxes are the speakers.
http://www.redtaghomefurniture.com/church.bmp

There are speaker wires coming to where their mixer was, but it doesn't look like there are enough wires that each is coming from one single speaker. I tested a few and some of them work, some of them don't, so I will need to find out where the connection is loose. But it looks like there is 1 wire coming for each of these speaker sets:
- 1 speaker wire for the 3 large speakers on main wall
- 1 wire for all the small ones around the main wall
- 1 wire for the large speaker hanging from the ceiling in the center
- 1 wire for the speakers on the balcony pointing towards the front
- 1 wire for speakers under the balcony pointing towards back
Is it okay that they are all hooked up like this, with one speaker wire going to multiple speakers?

Thank you so much for all of your comments and your help.

speco2003
06-10-08, 01:45 PM
OK run do not walk to this website

www.prosoundweb.com

They have a church forum there with pros to help you. There may be 2 or 3 of us on this forum here that are real pros and do audio for a living otherwise your getting no good info from anyone here.

vitaliygoretoy
06-10-08, 02:19 PM
I will try that as well.
Thank you

But I'm sure somebody here must know how can I should hook these up.

speco2003
06-10-08, 03:10 PM
I will try that as well.
Thank you

But I'm sure somebody here must know how can I should hook these up.


Ok well continue down this path then. If you really care then go where we as pros reside and get real help.

kwkshift
06-10-08, 04:34 PM
More than likely, that's a 70volt system which uses different equipment, wiring protocols and rules than what you will find on this site.

70 volt systems use "taps" at each speaker that detemines how much power they are allowed to take. For example, you could have 10 speakers daisy-chained off of one amplifier. Each speakers' tap, (generally a little knob on the speaker itself), could then be set to 2 watts. So in total you would be using 20 watts. This allows you to tune each speaker so that the one large speaker on the ceiling of your church could be tapped @ 20 watts, but another speaker on that same cable could be set to 8 watts, etc.

You'd be suprised what you can do with a 100 watt amplifier!

Check out the site mentioned earlier for some more detailed help.