BAPS Hindu Mandir, Northriding: every devotee hears every word

BAPS (Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha) is a worldwide Hindu faith and charity organisation. Its Northriding complex at 4 Dexter Road covers more than 37,000 square metres: a 32,000 m² cultural complex and a traditional mandir of about 2,500 m². It holds a place of worship, language and music classes, a sports complex and space for BAPS’s charitable work. Thousands of volunteers helped build it.

Mahant Swami Maharaj, BAPS’s global spiritual leader, travelled from India to lead the consecration ceremony. The complex opened to the public on 2 February 2025, during a 12-day Festival of Hope and Unity.

The main assembly hall is a very large room, and a large room is hard to cover evenly. Worship here is spoken, sung and chanted, so the words and the music need to be clear in every seat, whether a devotee sits at the front or the back. The sound should also seem to come from the stage, not from a loudspeaker overhead.

The building hosts everything from daily worship to festivals with thousands of visitors, and it is run by volunteers, so the system had to be dependable and simple to operate.

We designed, supplied, installed and commissioned a d&b audiotechnik Soundscape system. Soundscape places each voice and instrument where devotees expect to hear it, so the sound stays with the people on stage across the whole room.

Many d&b 10S loudspeakers are distributed through the hall, each close to the devotees it covers. That keeps the level even from front to back, without turning the volume up for the people furthest away. They are driven by d&b 5D amplifiers. d&b 5S front fills cover the first rows from the stage edge, and d&b 27A subwoofers carry the low end.

The whole system is connected on a Dante network, which sends the audio over the building’s standard network cabling. We also trained BAPS’s team to run it, and we support it.

The complex opened to the public in February 2025, at the end of a 12-day festival, and the main assembly hall is now equipped with a system designed so that every devotee hears clearly, wherever they sit.