Ashly touch turns sound to gold
Published: WORSHIP
US: St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida was built in 1942, its exterior and interior featuring white walls and ornate, gilded trim together with classical oil paintings and stained glass. Reverberant and boomy acoustics, paired with ineffective audio processing and loudspeaker placement, has led to Tampa-based A/V integrator CSI to use new sound reinforcement technology based on an Ashly Audio ne8800 DSP with a WR-5 NE remote control and a Bosch steerable Vari-directional Array.
Not only were the room’s acoustics challenging, but its status on the National Register of Historic Places took away the possibility of any structural changes. ‘No one, myself included, wanted to see the speakers in that beautiful room or to alter the room to hide them,’ said Paul Garner, principal of CSI. ‘We needed something discrete but effective.’ His solution was a Bosch digitally steerable line array, each line of which he camouflaged against the moulding surrounding the pulpit. Their precise coverage pattern focuses direct energy on the pews and minimises direct energy on the walls.
‘When I asked Father Michael if they had a sound person, he paused and then responded, “every person is our sound person”,’ continued Mr Garner. ‘Without guessing that it was possible, he went on to say that what he really wanted was a sound system that could take care of itself.’ Mr Garner duly provided Ashly’s Protea Networkable ne8800 digital processor, which features a gain-sharing automatic microphone mixer with automated feedback elimination. It’s a turnkey, ‘church-in-a-box’ sound system.
Mr Garner placed the DSP processor using all eight microphone-level inputs in the equipment rack at St Nicholas Church. To combat the room’s most prominent resonant frequency, around 450Hz, he high-passed every signal to the minimum frequency required to capture intelligibility for spoken word or musicality for the choir or cantors. To minimise any annoying high end, he rolled off everything above 10kHz.
‘The ne8800 does a fantastic job of providing auto-levelling, auto-mixing, and auto-feedback suppression,’ Mr Garner said. ‘With the full power of Ashly’s processing, I was able to dial in every aspect of the sound reinforcement with any tool I could imagine. It’s all there.’ When the church completes its internet infrastructure, Mr Garner will assign an IP address to the Ashly ne8800, which is network-enabled out of the box. It will allow him to make changes from anywhere, including his Florida office, saving a three-hour round trip.
‘After the first service with the new system, a parishioner approached Father Michael,’ recalled Mr Garner. ‘In broken English, coloured by a Greek accent, he said that he had been coming to St Nicholas for 30 years and this was the first day he was able to understand the Father’s words!’