HAMBURG, Germany – ASC (Amptown System Company) provided a new sound system for Hamburg's acoustically-complex St Michaelis church that includes Iconyx digital beam steering systems from Renkus-Heinz.
The 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 has an important role in German culture, regularly hosting televised services, most recently a memorial service for Loki Schmidt, wife of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, in November 2010.
Emphasizing the importance of the pulpit in Protestant churches, where the sermon is central to worship, the visitor handbook notes the ceiling of the marble pulpit was designed to reflect sound downward towards the congregation. It adds: "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."
Those issues have now been addressed by the new Renkus-Heinz Iconyx system, accompanied by a variety of Sennheiser wireless and Neumann wired microphones.
St Michaelis' open central hall is surrounded by acoustically complex areas including 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, was poor.
Roland Bruder, IT and Technology manager for St Michaelis Church, comments: "The old sound system wasn't specialized enough for our demands, which means the spoken word. Three systems were presented to the church community and they chose the system proposed by ASC."
The Hamburg branch of ASC handled the installation with sales and marketing manager Dierk Elwart and project managers Rüdiger Aue and Jörn Wehmeyer in charge.
"We demonstrated Iconyx loudspeakers in the church, and the effectiveness of the digital beam steering convinced the church community," noted Elwart. "It's ideal for this huge, complex room shape with recesses and balconies and a very long reverberation time, because you need to focus the sound very exactly into each area. This solution provided that focusing ability, and delivers high power from architecturally discrete and color-matched loudspeakers."
In all, 17 Iconyx columns were installed, with a pair of IC16s either side on the ground floor level with the pulpit, 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, and, finally, two more IC7s on marble pillars to cover two upper level balconies. (It stands as one of the largest such installations in Europe.)
BSS Soundweb London handles 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.
For more information, please visit www.renkus-heinz.com.
