Trinity-by-the-Cove is a lovely jewel of a church whose services include an excellent small choir and equally excellent organ. For the audio system renovation the goals were to increase speech intelligibility and intimacy and provide a high-quality recording system for services, rehearsals and concerts. Although the church is small and not highly reverberant, speech intelligibility was poor. The shortcoming was primarily caused by poor loudspeaker location as well as loudspeakers whose dispersion characteristics were not ideal for the shape of the church. The loudspeakers were also located behind flags which absorbed the high frequencies which provide a sense of vocal intimacy. A principal challenge was to demonstrate that loudspeakers could be mounted more visibly without distracting from the beautiful worship environment and that this would result in greatly improved intelligibility and clarity. The new system also included an excellent simple recording system and an iPad control.
