Preserving the Beauty of Grace Church While Transforming Intelligibility

At Grace Church in Seattle, upgrading the sound system meant solving two equally important challenges: improving intelligibility throughout the sanctuary while preserving the visual character of the space.

The church’s sanctuary features a narrow layout with vaulted wood ceilings, large glass windows, and a center aisle that functions as a flexible performance area for liturgy, music, weddings, and special events. The pastor regularly walks and speaks throughout this center space, making consistent coverage and feedback control critical to the design. At the same time, the church wanted the loudspeakers to remain as visually discreet as possible, keeping focus on the architecture, the service, and the congregation experience.

The installation was designed and integrated by Viation, who worked closely with 1 SOUND to develop a solution tailored specifically to the church’s architectural and acoustic challenges.

“We were kind of asking for magic,” said John Wilson, President of Viation. “They wanted a high-performance sound system that was invisible.”

Viation developed a custom design approach centered around Cannon C8 point sources with custom-matched wood finishes. Rather than using larger loudspeakers with longer throw characteristics, the system was designed as a distributed deployment using multiple compact loudspeakers placed strategically throughout the sanctuary.

This approach helped minimize reflections and excessive reverberance within the highly reflective architectural environment while maintaining intelligibility across the seating areas and center aisle. The controlled dispersion characteristics of the Cannon Series also helped keep energy focused on listeners rather than exciting the vaulted ceilings and glass surfaces unnecessarily.

“The benefit of the Cannon Series was keeping the sound on the people where it needed to be and not blasting around everywhere,” Wilson explained.

The final system deploys rows of Cannon C8 loudspeakers along both sides of the sanctuary, spaced approximately 15 feet apart and mounted along the exterior of the beams with only a minimal reveal. Angled carefully to match the rafters and optimize coverage, the loudspeakers visually disappear into the architecture while maintaining consistent sonic performance throughout the room.

Additional adjacent spaces within the church utilized Cannon C5 loudspeakers, while Powersoft amplification supported system deployment throughout the installation.

“We had several people come through during the install asking, ‘Where are the speakers?’” Wilson recalled. “They basically disappear.”

The distributed approach also allowed the system to be time-aligned so that speech and music maintain a natural sense of localization throughout the sanctuary, helping listeners feel connected to the person speaking rather than to the loudspeaker system itself.

Despite early discussions around adding subwoofers, the final deployment relied solely on the Cannon C8 loudspeakers for low-frequency support. According to Wilson, the result provided more than enough low-end extension for the room while maintaining balance within the highly reflective environment.

Following the first service with the new system installed, the impact was immediately apparent.

“One of the parishioners came up and said it was the first time he’d been able to hear a sermon the entire time he’d been going there for like 10 years,” Wilson shared.

For the church team, the upgrade transformed not only the clarity of the space, but also the overall usability of the sanctuary for worship, music, and events.

“I’m absolutely pleased with the final result,” Wilson said. “Operationally for the team at the church, it was essentially the same as operating the other system—just a much better canvas to paint on.”