TOLEDO, Ohio — The Historic Church of St. Patrick has seen plenty of change since it was built in 1892 to serve the workers building the Erie Canal, and its sound system benefited from a recent upgrade that included Renkus-Heinz’s Iconyx Digitally Steerable Array technology. “During the 1970s and 1980s, like many other Midwest cities, Toledo lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, and the neighborhood suffered,” said Don Beyer of Torrence Sound Equipment Company. “But the building is a historic landmark, and the diocese decided to revitalize the church with an extensive outreach program to the Catholic community in greater Toledo. We were called in to upgrade the sound system.”
Beyer’s company had installed the previous system, which he called “state-of-the-art at the time.” But with the newly-renovated cathedral drawing worshippers from affluent neighborhoods around Toledo, it was time to bring intelligibility and musicality up to a higher standard that would complement the meticulously restored interior, the new organ, and the exterior lighting that makes the cathedral a landmark on Interstate 75, the main highway through town.
With a neo-Gothic structure and a capacity of 1000, “the long reverb time made for very low intelligibility,” Beyer noted.
“After drawing an EASE model of the church, we recommended two IC24 Digitally Steerable Arrays in order to deal with the very large interior volume — the building is 180 feet long, with 65 foot ceilings,” Beyer said. “These columnar arrays are almost 10 feet tall, but only 6 inches wide. The digital beam steering allows us to mount the arrays flush to the wall, but aim the acoustic output at the congregation and keep it off the walls and ceilings.”
The 140° horizontal coverage of the Iconyx arrays allows just two IC24s to cover the entire main seating area.
Torrence Sound worked with the Church of St. Patrick to make the new system as cost-effective as possible. Some of the 8-inch two-way speakers from the previous installation were moved to cover the balcony and choir riser. The Crown amplifiers that power these speakers were also repurposed, along with a Crown UMS-810 processor and an 8-channel submixer that is used for the choir microphones.
Down on the podium, Torrence Sound installed three EV PolarChoice microphones, and provided a Countryman E6 headworn mic with a Sennheiser EW100 wireless system so that celebrants can move around the alter while still being clearly heard and understood by the congregation.
The Historic Church of St. Patrick was fully restored in September 2007, in a project funded by the Society for the Preservation of the Historic Church of St. Patrick, founded in 1984 by the Reverend John A. Thomas and by parish volunteers.
“With the new Iconyx system, St. Patrick’s now sounds as good as it looks,” Beyer said. “The congregation has grown enormously as a result of restoring the building and enhancing its functionality. They now average 800 people at Sunday services, which had fallen as low as 80 in the 1980s. In addition, St. Patrick’s is one the most frequently rented churches in the Toledo area for weddings, baptisms and other family events.”
For more information, please visit www.renkus-heinz.com.
