One of the San Francisco Bay Area’s first Jewish organisations, Temple Emanu-El describes itself as ‘a vibrant, musical and diverse Reform community offering meaningful worship services, lively holiday celebrations, and inclusive and affirming life-cycle events’.

Temple Emanu-El’s current building includes the Temple House social hall, which is used for worship service overflow, Rock Shabbat services, wedding receptions and a variety of other events.

Having suffered from poor sound and an aging sound system, Temple House called on Joe Orlando of Commercial Media Systems, who quicly identified the shoebox shape of the room, and its half-oak floor, hard walls and stucco ceiling as the source of the acoustic problems – giving a reverb time of more than 2s and ‘You couldn’t understand a conversation from three feet away,’ he says.

Orlando installed Perform Acoustics panels on the walls and ceiling to reduce the reverberation, and also replaced the old sound system with Community Entasys 220 Column Line Array loudspeakers and VLF208LV subwoofers at each side of the stage.

‘This is a multi-purpose space,’ he explains. ‘I needed a loudspeaker system that would sound great for music and provide intelligible voice all the way to the back of the room while still meeting the Temple’s budget. I knew the Entasys could do that. And Community’s VLF208LV subs are great for the Temple House musical services and special events.’

Orlando powered the system with QSC amplifiers and used a Symetrix Radius DSP system, which is highly flexible. It can be operated in ‘auto mode’ with a single volume control on the wall, or it can be controlled from an iPad via a wi-fi router. For larger events, like the Rock Shabbat services, the Temple plugs a Presonus mixer into a floor box in the centre of the room.

‘The Temple is very happy with the system,’ Orlando reports. ‘The rabbi loves the intelligibility, there are no feedback issues, and the system sounds great.’

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