Established in 1912 with Mass held in the homes of parishioners, St Mary Magdalene Catholic Church lies just outside the bustling Houston metropolis. With its sanctuary constructed in and consecrated in 1915, the church serves a thriving congregation with seven worship services each weekend for up to 1,200 people.
Stained glass depicting the 14 Stations of the Cross flank the sanctuary, while an altar featuring an ornate carving of the Last Supper dominates the dais. A wood-panelled ceiling and other hard surfaces have proved too great a challenge for its audio system, resulting in poor speech intelligibility.
Church leaders subsequently approached Shawn Mullins, founder and CEO of Covenant Communications, to design a more capable audio system.
An A/V integration company specialising in houses of worship, Covenant Communications has worked with Renkus-Heinz since the its inception. When specifying the audio upgrade St Mary Magdalene needed, Mullins recommended Renkus-Heinz’s ICLive X Series of steerable arrays to meet the church’s goals of even coverage and high intelligibility.
The ICLive X Series provides complete customisation of room coverage through individually steerable beams, and the loudspeakers’ high directivity made them a sound choice for a venue like St Mary Magdalene.
‘One of the changes St Mary Magdalene was making to their worship services was including more live music, so we wanted to ensure that the loudspeakers could reproduce full bandwidth audio with an emphasis on high speech intelligibility,’ Mullins says. ‘It’s a very lively room with a lot of hard surfaces. Because the space is so wide and the ceilings are so high, we wanted a wall-mounted line array solution. After looking at two or three manufacturers that offer active line arrays, we felt the ICLive X was the best fit for the sanctuary’s needs.’
Covenant Communications installed two arrays at the front of the nave, each comprising three ICLX and one ICLLX, approximately nine feet from the finished floor to the bottom of the array. Both steerable array modules include multiple 19mm compression drivers on Acoustic Source Multiplier (ASM) waveguides coaxially mounted in front of 8-inch woofers. The exclusive ASM waveguide minimises inter-driver spacing, ensuring gradient-lobe-free performance up to very high frequencies. The woofer arrangements maintain significant pattern control down to lower frequencies, providing system designers with the horsepower, steerability and directivity to deliver consistent coverage and clarity even in spaces with highly reverberant architecture like St Mary Magdalene.
The church requested a demonstration before installation, so Covenant Communications temporarily set up one array on a column. The contrast between the old system and just one column was stark, prompting the church to comment that ‘it sounds better with just one column than our entire sound system’.
‘Honestly, we expected the result and were happy that it matched our expectations. We knew what we were getting into,’ Mullins says. ‘Renkus-Heinz was one of our first manufacturing relationships, and we were an early adopter of the Iconyx Series. One of the reasons that we continue to value our relationship with Renkus-Heinz is their superior level of customer service. Their desire to be a partner in the process is continually and considerably higher than most manufacturers.’
More: www.renkus-heinz.com
