Site Visit Houston's Lakewood Church

By Pat Brown

Lakewood was the home of Houston Rockets NBA Basketball Team. It was converted to Lakewood Church.  Read about the audio and acoustical challenges of this remodel.

The Houston Operators and Technicians seminar attendees were treated to a site visit to the largest house of worship in the United States – Lakewood Church. The 16,000+ seat venue was once home to the Houston Rockets NBA basketball team. It was converted to an auditorium through an extensive remodeling project that included massive acoustical treatment. The head audio guy at Lakewood is Reed Hall – a technical “jack-of-all-trades” who devoted two evenings to accommodating the Syn-Aud-Con group. He and Brian Tankersly, a Grammy-winning engineer manage the extensive AV department at Lakewood.

The acoustical renovation was designed by the Russ Berger Design Group (RBDG, Inc.) of Dallas. Russ is a many-time Syn-Aud-Con grad who credits much of his current success to his interactions and friendship with Don and Carolyn Davis in the early days of Syn-Aud-Con. Russ flew down from Dallas to lead the tour, giving the attendees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear some great acoustical stories from one of the best in our industry.

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One of the most fascinating aspects of the project was that it was done on a shoestring budget. This forced Russ and Reed to get creative with regarding to making the venue suitable for music and speech reproduction. The venue had a reputation as an acoustical nightmare, with a low frequency reverb time approaching 8 seconds. The noise criteria rating was dismal, since the venue is located next to an interstate highway. There were no funds available to better isolate the outer shell of the building, so noise control was done internally with strategic placement of absorption and barriers. Low frequency absorption is both massive and expensive, and this room needed a lot of it. Russ had the clever idea of modifying the air plenum returns to be tuned LF acoustical absorbers, and the result was a halving of the LF reverberation time.

I found the signal distribution to be particularly interesting. All sources are digitized at the stage

and distributed over MADI to four Euphonix consoles located at FOH, on stage and in the AV suites on the 5th floor of an adjacent building. All four consoles get all channels from the stage, allowing production of Lakewood’s services and broadcasts to be conducted from any or all locations. A Nuendo audio production system records all channels on separate tracks, and any service can be recalled and replayed at any workstation, complete with video. The attendees were given an opportunity to remix the Easter service at the FOH console.

Russ, Reed and Brian shared some great info about the inner workings of Lakewood’s technical systems, include some horror stories of “things gone wrong” both in the main auditorium and the production suites. The project is a fine example of innovation, compromise and the use of physics and “horse sense” to solve real-world problems in practical ways.

Syn-Aud-Con would like to extend a very special thank you to Russ Berger, Reed Hall and Brian Tankersly for sharing their time and knowledge with our group. pb

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