Served the city of Muskego in the environs of Milwaukee since 1957, the St Leonard Catholic Church added a school in 1960 and becoming a vibrant community of more than 1,600 families. Dedicated in 1980, the current church building features a 65ft-wide by 100ft-deep sanctuary that – until recently – hosted entirely traditional services. Its outdated sound system consisted of a single centre speaker and a very old analogue mixer, with no outboard processing.

Now holding more contemporary services that include a live band with guitars, drum kit and piano, while retaining its choir and traditional preaching, that old sound system has been replaced. The parish looked to A/V and lighting systems integrators Sven Pro to design and install a new sound system with Design Engineer Zachary Lisko specifying a monaural system based on four TW Audio T20i compact installation loudspeakers, powered by Lab.gruppen D40:4L amplifiers.

‘As is typical of Catholic churches, St Leonard is highly reverberant, with little to no treatment,’ observes Lisko. ‘To handle more contemporary services, the new system had to provide solid pattern control and clear intelligibility for speech but also be capable of reinforcing live bands. It was important that the loudspeakers be unobtrusive so they wouldn’t change the overall look of the sanctuary. TW Audio T20i loudspeakers easily met all of these criteria.’

Complicating matters, the building was undergoing an expansion during the install. ‘Due to scheduling conflicts, the speakers needed to be available on short notice,’ Lisko recalls. ‘Fortunately, TW Audio was able to ship the PA system from Germany to Wisconsin amazingly quickly, despite the short notice, enabling us to complete the install within the church’s tight timeframe.’

TW Audio’s T20i loudspeaker features two 10-inch, long-excursion, low-frequency drivers and a 1.4-inch, mid-high-frequency compression driver in a symmetrical arrangement, with a passive crossover. It’s available with a rotatable, 90° x 50° horn or an optional or 60° x 40° horn, enabling four possible dispersion patterns. This sophisticated design delivers coherent phase response and constant directivity horizontally as well as vertically. Lisko took advantage of these features to design a four-loudspeaker system that covered the entire congregation while minimising reflections off the sanctuary’s many hard surfaces.

St Leonard has no official tech staff, so the new sound system had to be very simple to learn and use: ‘The client needed a system that is very simple to operate and that can be preprogrammed with scenes to allow easy access to the full capabilities of the system,’ Lisko explains. ‘The TW Audio T20i meets this need, as well, with dedicated presets for use with the Lab.gruppen D series amplifiers we installed at St Leonard.’ The Sven Pro team also installed a Behringer X32C digital mixer, as well as a Williams Sound induction loop system for hearing assistance.

‘At Sven Pro, we always strive to give the best quality for a fair and competitive price,’ states Lisko. ‘TW Audio has proven time and time again that they deliver consistently high quality and performance that lives up to our expectations, while coming in at a price that can easily be justified to clients. St Leonard’s new sound system fit their budget, doesn’t affect the sanctuary’s aesthetics, and sounds great in an untreated and reverberant space. The parish is very pleased.’