One-hundred-and-fifty years after its founding, the St Louis Bertrand Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky, still occupies was dedicated less than ten years later – and now attracts more than 2,000 parishioners on holidays.

The character of English Gothic churches such as St Louis Bertrand is well known – aesthetically beautiful and possessed of long reverberation times that complement choirs and pipe organs but make it difficult to understand the spoken word. At 110ft long and 50ft at its highest inside point, with lots of hard surfaces, St. Louis Bertrand is a prime example. Columns lining the interior and a choir loft with a pipe organ present further acoustical complications. Several unsuccessful attempts had been made at sound system upgrades over just a few years.

‘We’re very familiar with Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers, and had done a very similar room before,’ explains David Knight of Louisville’s Knight Audio, ‘so I’d seen Iconyx loudspeakers work in that situation.’

Knight installed a pair of Iconyx Gen5 IC24-RN digitally steered line array loudspeaker systems on the left and right at the front of the sanctuary. In the back of the room, a pair of Iconyx Gen5 IC8-RN steerable loudspeakers mounted on columns provide rear fill, their signals delayed to synchronise with the IC24-RNs.

The architecture of St Louis Bertrand’s new sound system is simple – priests use wired microphones, while a table mic covers the altar. The mics run into a Biamp TesiraForté processor, the outputs of which drive the loudspeakers throughout the building. Knight repurposed existing speakers where he could to keep upgrade costs down, such as in the cry room and other spaces outside the sanctuary, but the four Renkus-Heinz arrays handle all sound reinforcement in the sanctuary.

The IC24-RN and IC8-RN feature multichannel amplifiers powering arrays of purpose-designed coaxial transducers, each with its own triple-driver HF array. This triple tweeter ‘array within an array’ design reduces the distance between HF sources for greatly improved high-frequency performance with consistent, broad horizontal dispersion. Up to 12 steerable beams can be individually shaped and aimed from a single IC24-RN column using powerful software-controlled DSP, while the IC8-RN can shape and aim up to four beams. This enabled Knight to direct the sound where needed, while keeping it off of walls and ceilings.

It is rare when retrofitting a church to be able to install speakers exactly where you want them, but with the Iconyx’ beam steering, Knight was able to exact good coverage, even in some hard-to-reach areas. ‘The columns don’t line up exactly on both sides,’ he points out. ‘But even when you’re standing behind a column, you’re getting enough coverage from the speaker on the other side of the room that you don’t notice you’re behind a column.’

The improvement in coverage was dramatic, so much so that at first it was a little disorienting. ‘The staff at St Louis Bertrand suddenly were hearing the system so well that they thought it was too loud,’ recalls Knight. ‘I explained that the reason we put this system in was because people couldn’t hear well enough to understand what was being said. If you can hear it now, then that means other people can hear it, too. They got used to it.’

While custom finishes are available, the parish chose standard white loudspeakers to go with the church’s largely white interior. ‘The Iconyx speakers blend in pretty well,’ notes Knight. ‘In fact, I took another customer to St Louis Bertrand to look at the system, and she didn’t even notice the Iconyx columns. An IC8-RN was on a column ten feet in front of her and she asked me, “Well, where’s the speaker?”.’

More: www.renkus-heinz.com