Renkus-Heinz digitally steerable system updates Stockholm church
Published: WORSHIP
WORLD: A Renkus Heinz system has been installed into one of Stockholm’s major churches, the 900-capacity Katarina Church, by local distributor Luthman SMTTS. Originally built by royal decree in the 17th century, the church has been destroyed by fire twice and reopened after the second rebuilding in 1995, restored to its former glory with a large dome and four smaller towers.
Katarina Church has seen many attempts to resolve the acoustics of its highly reverberant, complex space with different loudspeaker solutions. ‘Their original PA was a traditional horn system, and after that there was an attempt to introduce a line array which looked pretty intrusive and didn't work well in acoustic terms,’ explained Karl-Gustaf Kahlau from Luthman SMTTS. ‘The biggest problem was the interior acoustics with up to eight seconds of reverb time, and at around the 100Hz region it's even worse.’
Luthman SMTTS AB updated the most recent PA system with an extra Renkus-Heinz digitally steerable system. ‘A single Renkus-Heinz digitally steerable Iconyx IC32 column was demonstrated to the church, and after tuning the multiple beams, using BeamWare, to focus on specific areas of the congregation,’ continued Mr Kahlau. ‘It performed fantastically well and the church people were delighted. It was great for everyday use and provided perfect speech intelligibility for sermons and so on. But because this is a very event-filled church, with up to 1,000 people at many large events, they were renting in supplementary units to add more coverage and power for those events. So a recent decision was made to expand the existing single mono system, based on Iconyx IC32 with IC16s as fills, into a stereo system with one IC32 on either side. With a little fine-tuning, again using Renkus-Heinz BeamWare to focus multiple individual beams from both columns on the different areas of the seating, the stereo Iconyx system has performed fantastically well without the need of any additional equipment, even for the largest events.’
No subwoofer was required as the system is capable of going down to around 80Hz, sufficient for most of the church’s needs, but one can be added as and when required.
‘It's been a great success and has completely solved the church’s acoustic issues while blending in perfectly with the beautiful architecture,’ concluded Mr Kahlau.