Design Beats Product. Every Single Time.

There's a hot take worth opening with, and it comes from Andrew Starke, Solution Architect here at Summit:

"A great product implemented poorly will always perform worse than a mediocre product designed and installed really well."

He'll go toe to toe with anyone on that. And after years of touring — playing arenas one night and churches the next — he's got the real-world evidence to back it up.

The nights that exceeded his expectations weren't always the rooms with the best gear. They were the rooms where someone had thought carefully about where the boxes went, how they covered the room, and what the physics of the space actually demanded. The nights that disappointed him most? Same-brand PA as what was in the truck. Designed poorly. Every limitation of the room amplified instead of solved.

This is the belief that shapes how we approach every PA design at Summit. Get the design right first. Everything else follows from there.

Start with the church, not the catalog

Before anyone opens a modeling program or starts comparing spec sheets, the first conversation is simple: tell us about you.

Not the technical stuff. Not how many seats or what your current SPL is. The real stuff.

What does your worship sound like? What does your band look like? Have you been to a show recently that gave you the feeling you're chasing? What did you love about it? What did you hate about something else?

The reason we start here: technical words are slippery. When someone says they want 95 dB, that means something different depending on the room, the mix, and what 95 dB their ears are remembering. But when someone says they want it to feel like a concert they attended — warm, full, a little room behind the sound — that's information we can actually work with.

We also need to understand not just what a church does 52 Sundays a year, but what they do the other days throughout the year. The youth service that gets loud. The touring artist that rolls through. The event that pushes the rig harder than anything else. If we design only for the average Sunday and the peak is 15 dB above it, we've built a system that spends half its life being hammered into its limits. That degrades gear. It also doesn't sound good.

The design should serve the full range of use — with enough headroom that the system is never stressed doing what the church actually does.

The spoken word trap

Here's something that gets pitched to churches constantly, and it's Andrew's personal audio trauma: "The most important thing is speech intelligibility."

It's not wrong. But it leads to wrong conclusions.

If you design a PA primarily for spoken word — optimizing around a voice frequency range, pulling back on everything else, treating music as a secondary concern — you'll end up with a system that works adequately for talking and struggles with everything else. And here's the thing: if you design a PA that covers the room evenly and consistently across the full frequency spectrum, with real attention to the low-mid energy where most mixes are won and lost (roughly 100 to 400 Hz), speech intelligibility takes care of itself.

"Design around music. If you can hit coverage and evenness for music, spoken word is going to be just great. You can design a system that absolutely destroys music and have someone sitting in an ideal spot still understand what's being said. But that's not actually a win."

The more useful question isn't "can everyone hear the pastor?" It's "does every seat in this room get a consistent, even, full-frequency experience?" Answer yes to that, and the pastor question is already answered.

From vision to room geometry

Once we understand what a church is chasing sonically, the design process starts filtering toward the right products and approaches.

Different PA manufacturers have different voicings — inherent characteristics in how they render frequencies that make them a better or worse fit for a particular style of worship. A church doing gospel is going to respond differently to certain products than one doing Bethel-style worship. That's not a knock on any manufacturer. It's physics and design philosophy. Not every brand works in every environment, and matching voicing to vision is part of the design work before a single box is placed.

Then comes the room. Height, length, width, balconies, balcony soffits, rake of the floor, surface materials — all of it matters. Covering a room consistently at 2-4kHz is relatively straightforward. Getting consistent low-mid energy from the front row to the back wall of a 150-foot room with a balcony is where the real engineering lives.

This is where PA design moves from product selection to actual design — how many boxes, what configuration, what angles, what positions. The model goes into software, and then — critically — it goes through an experience filter.

The model is a starting point, not a conclusion. Statistical modeling software has been around long enough that experienced designers know where it tells the truth and where it lies. The next step — walking the model through years of field experience — is what turns a good-looking prediction into a design that actually performs.

You can't tune bad design

This is foundational to how we work: we design our own systems, and we tune our own systems. Those two things belong together.

When the engineer who designed a PA is also the one standing in the room with measurement microphones, the feedback loop is tight. They know what they were aiming for. They know where the compromises happened and why. They can make informed decisions about what to address electronically and what to live with.

Tuning someone else's design is a different and harder problem. We often don't know what inputs they were given. We don't know what the original intent was. And in some cases — when the design itself has fundamental flaws — tuning can't fix it.

"You can't tune bad design. Get the mic in the right spot on the drum and it's going to sound amazing. You can swap in ten different microphones, but you can't EQ your way out of a bad position."

The same principle scales up from a microphone to a PA. Electronics can correct some things. They can't correct a system that doesn't cover the room, or one that creates comb filtering because boxes are fighting each other, or one that can't get low-mid energy to the back seats because the physics don't work. Even the leading manufacturers — the ones on every major tour — will tell you: get the mechanical design right first. The electronics come after, and they're tools for refinement, not rescue.

On brand preferences — and when to push back

Preferences are real. They're not irrational. They come from experience — someone heard something they loved in a specific room, or they've worked with a brand long enough to know its characteristics intuitively. That's valid information.

The problem comes when preference overrides vision. When a church insists on a specific brand in a configuration that can't cover the room properly, the right move is to have an honest conversation — not to just build what's requested and walk away.

"If I'm forced into a situation where it's this brand and we're only going to cover half the room — part of me would rather walk away. Because two production directors from now, all the context gets forgotten. And they're looking at the system going: why did they do that?"

We've been hired by churches multiple times for multiple PA replacements because the production director changed and the incoming person had a different brand preference. We've actually hit pause on those projects and asked for a meeting with church leadership to make sure the decision is genuinely aligned with the church's vision — not just the current audio person's preference.

That's not easy to do. XPs and financial stewards appreciate it. And it's the right thing to do for the long-term health of the church.

Are PA shootouts worth it?

The honest answer: mostly no.

Andrew's been in more shootouts than he can count. His conclusion: a shootout tells you about tonality, and nothing else. You can walk away knowing which manufacturer's voicing you prefer. What you cannot know from a shootout is how that system would actually perform designed and installed in your specific room.

"The shootout itself is such a small part of the picture. I'd rather everyone submit their design and audition the design — not just the box."

There are also practical integrity issues with shootouts that are difficult to control. Manufacturers want to win. Not all of them play it straight. If there's no agreed tuning shape going in, you're not hearing apples to apples — you're hearing whoever boosted their low end or bumped their volume by a dB. It's harder to control than it sounds, and the history of shootout outcomes doesn't inspire confidence that they reliably identify the best system for the room.

If a church wants to evaluate options, the better path is usually this: work through the design process with a qualified integrator, narrow to two or three products that genuinely meet the baseline, and then go hear those systems in rooms where they're already installed and properly designed. Hear the actual product in an actual context, not a controlled competition where everyone's playing for the win.

The acoustics piece

One last thing worth saying: the PA is one of three variables that determine how a room sounds. The other two are room geometry and the acoustic treatment package.

Acoustics and PA design are not separate conversations. A room with bad back wall reflections may need the PA shaded differently in the high frequency range. A room with too much reverb will make speech intelligibility a challenge regardless of how good the PA is. A room with dead acoustic treatment and an over-engineered PA will sound clinical and harsh.

All three have to work together. The acoustical package — more than most churches realize — is where well over half of how a room sounds actually lives. The PA is doing its job in the context that acoustics creates.

If you haven't already, go back and watch the acoustics episode in this series. The PA conversation only makes full sense in that context.

The best projects don't start with a purchase order. They start with a purpose. Our team has helped hundreds of churches find the sweet spot between their vision and their budget. We’d love to help.

If this sparked ideas, check out the full Gear Follows Vision episode here.