Right steer for Catholic church
Published: WORSHIP
US: St Gabriel’s Catholic Church in California has unveiled its long-awaited new sanctuary. Designed in traditional cruciform style, the church’s pulpit and altar reside beneath a massive, domed wood and aluminium barrelled ceiling that has been blow-torched and sanded to give it a rustic appearance. Hundreds of unfinished wood pews sit atop an expansive polished concrete floor, surrounded by a drywall interior.
Although visually stunning, the many reverberant surfaces throughout the new building posed a challenge for AMT Systems, the California-based audiovisual contractor responsible for designing and installing the church’s new audio system. Like many contemporary churches, St Gabriel’s incorporates music into most worship events with live musicians and vocalists frequently featured in services. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, AMT Systems had to provide a steerable system with high intelligibility and musical output.
‘It’s a gorgeous looking facility, but acoustically it presented some difficult musicality and intelligibility issues,’ explained AMT’s Mike Shelton. ‘Cruciform architecture presents its own special challenges. Typically you have sound bouncing all over the place, muddying the intelligibility with echoes and timing problems. It’s very hard to get even coverage in cruciform transept spaces.’
Together with St Gabriel’s, AMT selected Iconyx digitally steerable line array loudspeaker technology from Renkus-Heinz. Two IC32/16-R systems are column-mounted on either side of the domed ceiling. The pastoral mics route back to a DSP processor controlled by a Crestron touch screen and iPad. All musical instrument inputs route to a Yamaha LS9 mixer. Both inputs remain live throughout the programme or service.
Utilising Beamware modeling software, Mr Shelton configured shape and throw distance to direct sound to the nave and other areas that have previously been dead spaces. Mr Shelton also reported that Beamware helped the team to eliminate much of the need for acoustical treatment, now only necessary on the domed ceiling to ensure maximum sound absorption from its highly reflective, corrugated aluminium panels.