CHESTNUT HILL, PA – St. Paul's Episcopal church was built in 1929 with a ship-shaped ceiling. It harkens back to the Ark and Biblical fishermen, but, unfortunately, it's less-than-ideal for audio reproduction. The Rev. Cliff Cutler retained Spinnaker-Multimedia Solutions to study the room acoustics and improve on the audio system.
"We were retained to correct poor sound distribution and speech intelligibility problems," said Fenicia Redman, VP Project Development at Spinnaker.
The original systems consisted of massive stadium speakers with overhead microphones for speech and choir reproduction, and "parishioners seated in the rear couldn't understand the spoken word or the choir very well. So we did what we always do – modeled the space.
"There was no way we were going to touch the room without an acoustic model," Redman continued. "We used EASE and tested speakers from various manufacturers so that the client was able to see the sound distribution and plots from each and Martin Audio's OmniLine array performed better than the others.
"The choice was based on a process that was thoroughly engineered," Redman noted. "The room is about 100 feet deep and the decibel span was plus or minus 2.18 dB across the entire seating area, which is amazing and fully documented."
Spinnaker installed 16 OmniLine enclosures, with four modules of four each along the center beam of the ceiling, color-matched to the interior of the sanctuary so as to be completely unobtrusive, if not nearly invisible.
The rest of the system included and Allen & Heath IDR-S mixing and processing system; a BSS Blu-100 networked signal processor; Crown amplifiers; DPA and Sennheiser microphones, and a William Sound hearing impaired system.
Once the system was completed, Redman said the client was "thrilled" with the sound. "Every seat matters in a church, and OmniLine delivered on the commitment to achieve clear sound and intelligibility."
"We took down these huge speakers, and now we have this array that fits right into the space," said Rev. Cutler. "It's not any wider than the beams of the church, so it just blends right in and matches the ceiling perfectly, and the sound is very good.
For more information, please visit www.martin-audio.com.
