Serving as the cathedral for the Diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee, from 1988 until recently, the Sacred Heart Cathedral has given way to the new US$30.8m, 1,300-plus seat Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. With assistance from McCrery Architects, architectural firm BarberMcMurry designed the space to be ‘sublime and functional’, while TSAV worked with all parties on the facility’s acoustics and sound reinforcement system.
‘We’ve completed several successful projects with the Catholic Church including two recent sound reinforcement systems at churches in Georgia,’ explains TSAV Technology & Standards and Senior Systems Architect VP, Keith Reardigan. ‘We were brought in early and contributed to programmatic design and acoustical design – for example, we were able to suggest acoustical treatments that would nicely balance the often-conflicting needs for intelligible spoken work and music.’
Both speech and music are delivered by a Danley Sound Labs J3-64 Jericho Horn and four Danley SM80 loudspeakers for fill.
‘Whereas an untreated room of comparable size might normally have a six to eight second reverb, we brought the Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus down to around two seconds when empty – enough to really help with intelligibility but not so much as to spoil the music,’ Reardigan says.
He sought to keep the sound directed towards the congregation and away from the walls. Mindful of the cathedral’s low-tech aesthetic, TSAV installed a music reinforcement system at the rear of the room, hidden below the choir loft. ‘We didn’t want to excite a lot of air and surfaces unnecessarily,’ Reardigan confirms. ‘We’ve completed several projects that had that same imperative with Danley Sound Labs loudspeakers, and we’ve been impressed with their ability to deliver a coherent waveform over long distances and its pattern control.’
A single Danley J3-64 Jericho Horn – the same loudspeaker used to deliver sound in some of the world’s largest stadia – covers almost all of the seating from its location under the choir loft. Four additional SM80s, two for close fill and one each for the two transepts, complete the system with QSC amplifiers and Biamp DSP. A Bose column array system at the front of the church coupled with K-Array micro-format speakers integrated into overhead hung lighting fixtures provide primary speech reinforcement, and a Yamaha QL console together with custom Crestron controls allow an engineer to control both set-ups. The Crestron interface allows the church to use the system for simple events without requiring an audio tech to run the console.
Danley Chief Engineer Ivan Beaver, travelled to Knoxville to assist in system commissioning.
‘The space is fantastic,’ reports Glen Kahler, the church’s Director of Music & Liturgy. ‘The team at TSAV was able to find the happy medium between high speech intelligibility and lively acoustics for music – neither is a sacrifice. The loudspeakers are wonderful and fill the space beautifully.’
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