First Presbyterian covered by Iconyx
Published: WORSHIP
WORLD: The 650-seat First Presbyterian Church in Texas recently underwent a major makeover that included new seating and décor and a new sound system based around Renkus-Heinz’ Iconyx digitally steered column array loudspeakers. Acoustical design firm Kirkegaard Associates was brought in to design a new system for the room.
‘It's a beautiful, traditional, high-ceilinged space, and spoken word intelligibility has always been a bit of a challenge,’ explained Derek Anderson of Sound Logic Integrations. ‘They put in a fairly elaborate system around 10 years ago, and even though it was state-of-the-art for the time, it never really solved the problem. Plus aesthetics was a big concern. The previous system clashed badly with the room's architecture, and they were determined to avoid that mistake again.’
More than 12 speakers in the previous system were replaced by a single pair of Iconyx IC24-R-II columns on either side of the proscenium. ‘The room is fairly deep, and we chose the IC24 because it gave us excellent control over directivity,’ explained Mr Anderson. ‘We were really able to steer the sound to cover only the seating areas, without hitting the walls and floors and other reflective surfaces.
‘We had a window of only a few weeks to install the system, so we were quite happy with how easy it all went in,’ he continued. ‘We finished literally only a few hours before the first service. The day we were finishing up the install, some of the church elders walked in and asked me where we were going to hang the speakers. They didn't even see them until I pointed them out!
‘Everyone has been very happy with the results,’ he enthused. ‘They went from using more than 30 hearing assist systems to using about five or six.’