An important gathering place and Mother Church for Catholics living in the Archdiocese of Boston, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross is also the largest church of any faith in New England. An extensive renovation project of the 150-year-old Gothic revival structure begun in 2018 marked the first real attention the building had received since its dedication in 1875 – including a full overhaul of the cathedral’s sound system.
Now featuring Innovox steerable line arrays powered by Powersoft Ottocanali 1204 amplifiers and a custom designed line-array employing Powersoft D-Cell 504 2/4-channel amplifier modules with onboard DSP and controlled by Powersoft’s Armonía software, the results of the renovation were debuted to in excess of 30m viewers worldwide via CatholicTV’s of the Chrism Mass in April. Commlink Integration Corporation CTO and President of Landry Audio Division, Evan Landry, designed the new sound system around a custom unit based on a column of two Innovox MicroBeam 32 units.
‘The primary focus of the system acts as an acoustic anchor, so that all the sound sounds like it’s coming from the chancel – the place where it looks like it’s coming from,’ Landry explains. ‘The purpose is to increase listener engagement, clarity and intelligibility.’
Due to the physical limitations in the cathedral, the custom MicroBeam system uses 52 elements – rather than the usual 64 – and Powersoft’s D-Cell 504 module to provide processing and power for the dipole spaced low-frequency section and processed line level outputs used with the cathedral’s custom MicroBeam.
The Innovox MicroBeam steerable line array uses 26 active mid/low-frequency elements (2.75-inch cone drivers), which are powered by Powersoft D-Cell 504 modules, and 26 high-frequency elements (3.25-inch ribbon drivers).
‘Virtually everything Innovox does as a company uses either ribbon or AMT [Air Motion Transformer]-type high-frequency elements,’ says Innovox Audio owner, Chris Oswood. ‘We do this for the principle reason of improved transient response over conventional means, and that has everything to do with delivering the speech chain to the listener without the degradation that results in loss of articulation. We do that to keep the transient information present, and to optimize for speech clarity – but it has a kind of corollary benefit, which is clarity and detail in musical reproduction.
‘We use the D-Cell modules in our MicroBeam designs primarily because of the sound quality of the processor and amplifier sections,’ he continues. ‘Additional benefits that we find useful are the form factor, small physical size and power density of the modules. Many of our products are columnar in shape, and these modules are easily integrated as a result.’
To carry the sound coverage from the chancel through the 200ft extending back to the rear of the nave, Landry and Oswood installed 18 additional Innovox line arrays – one for each of the support columns running along the aisle. For powering each of the support line arrays along the columns, an additional five channels of monitors, plus another speaker acting as a mirror image of the acoustic anchor, they chose Powersoft Ottocanali 1204 amplifiers.
‘We knew that we needed one discreet channel per speaker in the column, because we needed to have them appropriately delayed from the perspective of the MicroBeam,’ Landry says. ‘There are 18 columns that essentially have to have unique delay times, so we knew our channel count was going to be high, and we knew the amount of power we were going to need was going to be relatively low, since the column speakers were just used for articulation extension. The Ottocanali 1204 had the combination of high channel count and low power channels, while maintaining the sound quality that we needed to make this a world-class installation.’
‘We certainly encourage the use of Powersoft,’ Oswood continues. ‘The difference in sound quality between Powersoft and other manufacturers is significant, and – in my opinion – really under-appreciated in the industry.
‘Build quality is also very high with the product, as well as the package density. Often various parties in projects really battle for rack unit real estate, and high power density is really helpful on these projects. The efficiency of the product is not lost on us either, in terms of power consumption, cost to operate, and environmental considerations. That’s another area, of course, where Powersoft is leading – but the real driver for us is sound quality.’
To set up the system’s DSP Oswood used Powersoft Armonía software, which he’s knows well: ‘We use Armonía routinely in other products by Powersoft,’ he says. ‘It’s a very easy-to-use platform, and it has a lot of flexibility. We’re kind of lumping together a number of things when we talk about sound quality, but that refers to the quality of the amplifier sections, as well as the sound quality of the DSP. And the quality of the Ottocanali DSP is very high.’
More: www.powersoft-audio.com
