  The house of worship is rarely a perfect acoustical model when
it comes to understanding speech or listening to music,
especially in large spaces where the reverberant sound level is
most often the culprit. Other issues, such as early reflections,
refraction, and absorption, all contribute in a complex way to
the “acoustic signature” of the space, and can also contribute
to problems with intelligibility. Surprisingly, it can often be
the untreated, highly focused reflections that cause the biggest
problems with intelligibility. In any case, it is usually a
compromise between music and speech that must be struck when
designing houses of worship, and if you are lucky enough to be
involved with such a project from its inception, when the
architect can be influenced, then there will at least be some
control over the outcome.  More often than not, when a sound
system must be adapted to an existing house of worship, a
combination of subjectivity and empirical measurement is used to
affect the outcome. Let's look