If there's one common area of contention with the technical ministries group when a church is renovating or building a new auditorium, it's probably the location of the tech booth. Pastors generally want the tech booth invisible; the tech team wants it in the best possible location.
So, let's discuss what the options are, and what the challenges are in each location. Most of the challenges are audio related, but other positions can suffer as well. We'll start with the worse options and move upwards from there.
The Shoebox
The absolute worse idea for a tech booth position is to carve out a niche in the back wall and stick the tech booth in there. The tech booth location is 90% about the audio system, and in a little room behind the auditorium with a window looking out into the sanctuary, the audio tech has no idea at all what the room sounds like.
Sound is a very non-intuitive thing. It bounces around a room, reflecting off of some surfaces and being absorbed into others. When it bounces, it interacts with the direct sound from the PA system and reflections from other surfaces. The cubic footage of the space shapes the sound due to these reflections.
If your audio person is sitting in a shoebox behind the auditorium with the sound entering through a window cut through the wall, there is no way that space sounds anything like the large, open space of the auditorium. They simply can't know what the auditorium is sounding like, and thus can't adjust the mix to sound good in the main room. Trying to work in that environment means that your sound person has to be so amazingly good (like, serious professional audio engineer good) that they know how bad they need to make their shoebox sound so that it sounds good in the room. Most of the time, this isn't going to happen.
And most audio engineers who are that good would take one look at this situation and walk away.
Some churches add monitor speakers in the tech booth so the audio tech can hear better. However, this does not take into account the physics of the sound bouncing around the auditorium. It will make the shoebox sound better, but not the mix for the main room.
For your lighting person, they can't see what the stage looks like from the perspective of someone attending the service. They can't walk around the room easily and return to make adjustments. And for all the people serving in the shoebox, they are completely cut off and isolated form the members of the church.
These people are usually introverted; physically cutting them off from the congregation makes it a spiritually poor environment to serve in. And it also makes it that much harder to recruit new team members because no one sees them or what they do.
And lastly, the shoebox often has poor access to the room. If there are issues to resolve and the tech needs to make repeated trips between the stage and tech booth to resolve them, this position will inhibit quick resolution of those issues.
So what are the better options? We'll cover that next time!