Being crowded out of a Melbourne suburb fast-tracked for urban growth, the community at St Paul’s Lutheran Church relocated to a quieter location with room to expand – taking up the site of the St James Uniting Church short distance down the road and inheriting its striking mid-century architecture.
A full renovation of the church building included a high-quality audiovisual fit-out and a Martin Audio O-Line sound reinforcement system.
St Paul’s Lutheran found an integrator in Mozaix that understood house of worship requirements, and director Paul Tucker immediately struck up a rapport with the church’s building committee. Paradoxically, the original St James space had been too acoustically ‘dead’ – an almost unique problem to find in a church building. Due to its carpeted floors and vaulted ceiling, its un-renovated form it didn’t suit St Paul’s style of ‘call-and-response’ worship. Acoustic engineer Andrew Nicol installed signature reflective diffusers on the front wall and behind the band stage, as well as hard stone tile flooring and acoustic panels on the rear wall, and acoustic absorption on the balcony fascia. The result is an acoustically live but sufficiently controlled acoustic that suits congregational involvement and accommodates high SPL sound reinforcement.
Nicol briefed A/V system designer Hanson Associates, and consultant Mark Thompson noted that given the acoustic design – and in order to enable the church to benefit from this live reverberaton – the loudspeaker system best suited to meet all requirements was a Martin Audio O-Line. This, he felt, would provide properly engineered speech reinforcement, and the decision to specify 12 elements per side was based on Hanson’s acoustic modelling.
Both Paul Tucker and Hanson Associates have worked on previous jobs involving the sleek Martin Audio O-Line micro-array, and all participants were confident it would deliver the goods for the St Paul’s fit-out. The technology suggested that it would.
Every element of the Martin Audio O-Line PA is individually addressed by its own amplifier channel and processing, allowing the array to be beam steered, keeping energy out of the ceiling space and the pipe organ loft. Unlike many DSP-steered columns, an O-Line array does not produce vertical sidelobes in the audio band. This is critical in reverberant environments, since sidelobes, firing above and below the array, simply adds to the reverberant energy, impacting negatively on intelligibility. O-Line’s ability to reproduce very high frequencies without side-lobes for both full-range speech and music reproduction in houses of worship.
‘It’s a very transparent PA – it’s not lumpy in the bottom end,’ says Tucker. ‘It really connects to the room nicely. Hanson Associates took care of the final tuning of the PA and it’s come up nicely. We had a consecration service featuring a fantastic viola player, and the sound of that instrument was beautiful – really stunning.’
The system is completed by Allen & Heath mixing (over Dante) and Q-Sys signal processing; a church volunteer can fire up both the PA and the projectors with a couple of clicks of an iPad. The A/V booth is also the control hub of all video and streaming capabilities (St Paul’s has been recording and broadcasting services since well before the Covid-19 pandemic).
Finished in neutral light grey, to blend in with the architecture, the slimline, discreet and architecturally sympathetic O-Line arrays set the tone for the install. The video projection and architectural lighting sources are equally discreet, and so when it comes to technology, transparency has been the watchword. ‘We’re very pleased with the results,’ says David Pietsch, who heads the church’s strategic property group, in summary.
Martin Audio systems are distributed in Australia by the Technical Audio Group (TAG).
