VISALIA, CA — A small city in the southern part of California’s Central Valley, Visalia is home of the new Saint Charles Borromeo Church, with seating for 3,400 worshippers. The massive project was built in the historic Mission Revival style and completed at a cost of $21 million dollars. The building is laid out in a cruciform design with a long central axis with two side transcepts at right angles forming the cross shape.
Rocky Giannetta, the principal audio/acoustical consultant at GIA Design Group, was hired for the project by the Diocese of Fresno, CA, as he had worked on similar projects for them in the past, designing and overseeing the installation of church sound systems. Giannetta was also asked to recommend contractors and integrators for the project. Other bids came in lower, but the job was awarded to Spider Ranch Productions, which according to SRP’s integration project manager and senior systems engineer Mark Sweet, was due to the intricacies of the rigging and the logistics of the complex job.
Giannetta began the design phase by doing acoustic modeling of the new, from-the-ground-up construction project. This is the largest Catholic Church in the United States, an extremely large space about 320 feet front-to back with a footprint under the roof of nearly an acre. The architect wanted a completely open look, specifying that no speakers could hang below the wooden rafters that support the roof of the nave and transepts. To further complicate issues, the huge project was scheduled to start just as Covid was beginning, creating numerous construction delays.
Given the scope and goals of the project — including the space’s 2.1-second reverberation time — both Giannetta and Sweet agreed that Danley’s full-range SH50 and four SH60 Synergy Horn speakers would be an ideal choice. The SH50 and SH60 are three-way, double-12, horn-loaded systems with 50°x50° or 60°x60° dispersion, opening into a 28”x28” horn mouth.
“In these larger rooms, speaker system directivity — getting the sound down onto the people — is very important and directivity below the crossover point in the low-mid 200 Hz to 1k Hz area really helps intelligibility and sonic presence at lower SPLs,” Sweet explains. “And these higher directivity Danley speakers are large enough to reproduce those wavelengths, down into the 400-500 Hz range, where there’s still directivity.”
Powersoft Ottocanali and Quattrocanali amplifiers drive the system’s 24 Danley, four Renkus-Heinz, eight Soundtube speakers; and every low impedance speaker was a home run to an individual power amp. In addition to the SH50 and SH60 mains, six SM100 and two SH95 units supplement the nave coverage. Two SM60F provide upstage side-fill coverage for choir and ancillary seating, while six Danley THMini 12” subs add LF punch. Two Renkus-Heinz CX41 compact 4” coaxials cover the large altar area, while Soundtube CM 500i-WH and SM 500i-II speakers are in the sacristy and narthex ceilings. Additionally, two Danley SBH20LF-AT columns mounted on light poles cover the large outdoor patio area.
Special attention was given to microphone selection, which includes Earthworks FW730 choir and FMR 600 / FMR 500 pulpit mics and Mipro 848 and 828 digital wireless systems that interconnect via Dante.
A Xilica Solaro FR-1D mainframe supplies open-architecture 40-bit floating point DSP, handling 64×64 bidirectional audio channels over Dante. Digital audio mixing is courtesy of a 40-channel Yamaha TF-1 console with 16 mic/line inputs, 16 analog outs and a 64×64 AoIP Dante card. Services are livestreamed via three PTZ Optics video cameras with an NDI interface.
Sweet, Giannatta and Spider Ranch Productions systems engineer Duane Klose spent about a day and a half on final system checks and tuning, along with alignment, testing and verifying. According to Sweet, “that starts with impedance measurements of speakers and testing everything to make sure it’s right. And when Rocky comes in, he does tuning and alignment with us, putting in all of the values he pre-calculated and then retesting to validate his design. He’s all about accuracy and usually comes in within the 90th percentile of his initial predictions.”
It was a long project that stretched out over several years. “But,” Sweet reports, “once it was completed and all tuned in, the musicians and other people from the church came in and heard it. Everybody loved it.”
CREW
Integrator: Spider Ranch Productions
Consultant: Rocky Giannetta, GIA Design Group
Project Manager/Sr. Systems Engineer: Mark Sweet
Lead Installer/Foreman: Jake Scharosch
Systems Engineer / Software Programmer: Duane Klose
Installer: Greg Davis
Riggers: Vincent Fardel
- For more info, visit Spider Ranch Productions at www.spiderp.com
