DSAs are Improving Intelligibility at Europe's Landmark Churches
They were built centuries ago for a higher purpose, and their beauty has endured. The challenge for today's audio system designers and installers is to preserve the aesthetics of the past while helping speech and song to be heard and understood better than ever before in these venerable spaces. Digital tools – including digitally steerable arrays (DSAs) from RCF and Renkus-Heinz – are succeeding in raising intelligibility to new heights.
St. Mark's Basilica
St. Mark's Basilica, first consecrated by the Roman Catholic Church in 1094, is the best-known of all the churches in Venice. It's particularly famous for the opulence of its mosaics, Byzantine architecture and the artistic adornments that have accumulated over the centuries, both inside and out. On May 8, Pope Benedict XVI visited St. Mark's Basilica for a ceremony that venerated its sacred relics.
Along with church leaders, the site is visited by 1.5 million people per year – none of them (okay, maybe just a few) who make the journey to see the audio gear that's been mounted on the walls.
A recent audio upgrade – well in advance of the Pope's visit – included 40 RCF loudspeaker enclosures and no fewer than 10 VSA 2050 digitally steerable vertical line arrays, all custom-painted to blend in with their surroundings.
"The brief I got from the client was, above all, to ensure a considerable increase in intelligibility and flexible control of the various sectors," says Marco Mazzon, who installed the system. "There are approximately 30 microphones used by officiates and singers in seven different zones of the church," he notes.
Although Mazzon was able to use his detailed knowledge of the Basilica and its logistics for his design of the signal management system, he turned to RCF's Francesco Venturi and its dedicated installed sound division for the acoustic design. Venturi presented a detailed report and acoustic simulation documentation along with the final design.
The main challenge had been the varying listening distances (a few to 30 meters) and the need for considerable SPL combined with even distribution while improving intelligibility without increasing reverberation problems.
"The VSA systems provide the ideal solution," Mazzon says. The 10 VSA 2050 arrays, mounted on the church's columns, cover the "congregation" zone of the Basilica.
Six of the 10 systems cover the front area of the naves and transept (side spaces). The other four are mounted 20 meters further forward and are appropriately delayed to cover the rear portion of the naves. Two compact RCF MR 33WT enclosures installed below the ambos, or raised pulpits, enhance coverage for the first rows of worshippers.
With a DSP circuit that takes advantage of a direct digital connection to 20 Class D 50W amplifiers, the VSA 2050 processes the audio signal fed to each of its 20 loudspeakers to control their vertical dispersion, driving them with the necessary power for ensuring sufficient dynamics and appropriate coverage.
Other RCF enclosures installed in the Basilica, both indoors and outside, include 17 two-way passive loudspeaker columns (versions CS 6940 and 6520) in the other seven zones of the church.
These zones include the entire area of the presbytery (the area reserved for clergy) and the Pala d'Oro (the high altar's ornate backdrop), the Baptistery, the chapel of St. Isidore and the narthex.
Three MR33T "service" enclosures are positioned at the two organs (as monitors for the organists) and in the vestry.
On particularly important occasions, six H6045 fiberglass multi-cell long-throw exponential horn speakers, each fitted with four D5076 drivers, are mounted outside the Basilica with fast-lock hardware and cover all of St. Mark's Square.
After the installation work was completed, RCF technicians took a series of measurements to ensure that the system's performance achieved the acoustic objectives.
St. Michaelis Church
Hamburg, Germany's St. Michaelis Church, originally built in 1750, features a Baroque interior with a profusion of architectural detail. Destroyed by fire in 1906, then rebuilt virtually brick for brick, it plays an important role in German culture, regularly hosting televised services, including the memorial service for Loki Schmidt, wife of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, in November 2010.
Although there are features of the church designed to improve acoustics for the sakes of both sermon-givers and worshippers, such as the ceiling of the marble pulpit, which reflects sound downward toward the congregation, the church's visitor brochures still note that, "in those days sermons lasted one to two hours…We can understand why, in the days before microphones, so many clergy complained about problems with their vocal chords."
To address those issues, the Hamburg branch of ASC (Amptown System Company) provided a new Renkus-Heinz Iconyx system, accompanied by a variety of Sennheiser wireless and Neumann wired microphones.
Their respective architectural stylings differ greatly, but as with St. Mark's Basilica, the interior spaces of St. Michaelis are complex. In the Hamburg landmark church, the open central hall is surrounded tall, deep balconies that recede into semicircular cupolas, in some areas out of direct sight of the pulpit. A cupola on the north side houses an electronic organ and tiered choir stalls. Across the hall, tiered balcony seating rakes back some 15 meters. Sermon intelligibility in these areas, and in the deep under-balcony areas, has always been poor.
"The old sound system wasn't specialized enough for our demands, which means the spoken word," noted Roland Bruder, IT and technology manager for St. Michaelis Church. "Three systems were presented to the church community and they chose the system proposed by ASC."
The Hamburg branch of ASC handled the installation at St. Michaelis, led by Dierk Elwart, sales and marketing manager, and project managers Rüdiger Aue and Jörn Wehmeyer.
Elwart notes that, following a demo of the Iconyx loudspeakers in the church, it was "the effectiveness of the digital beam steering" that most impressed the church leadership and others. "It's ideal for this huge, complex room shape with recesses and balconies and a very long reverberation time," Elwart adds.
To focus the sound "very exactly into each area," and also deliver the required power for coverage, ASC installed a total of 17 Iconyx columns. As with the installation of the RCF gear at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, the Iconyx columns at St. Michaelis in Hamburg were custom-painted to blend in with their surroundings.
The design starts with a pair of IC16s on both sides of the ground floor, level with the pulpit, and adds another pair of IC16s for the sides and a delay pair of IC8s, all digitally steerable.
Upstairs, digitally steerable IC24s flank the archway of the altar, forming the main balcony system, supplemented by a mechanically steerable IC7 stack on both sides for the rear balcony and another pair of IC7s for the balconies' outer areas. Finally, two more IC7s are used on marble pillars to cover two upper level balconies.
The design and installation team relied upon BSS Soundweb London to handle the audio routing, with analog audio distribution to the loudspeakers, while system control has been intentionally simplified to a basic, custom-designed control panel for use by non-technical staff.
"The toughest thing in doing a system like this is waiting for feedback from the public. And there's been no feedback at all, which is precisely the response we were hoping for," said Elwart.
