The first Roman Catholic cathedral built in the US, the Baltimore Basilica underwent an extensive restoration between 2004-2006 which included installing modern technical systems throughout the building.
Constructed between 1806 and 1821, the 1200-seat Basilica’s high ceilings and hard surfaces conspire to present a challenging acoustic environment. Room reverberation time measures 4.5s at mid frequencies and 6.1s at low frequencies.
To address the intelligibility problems this causes, the Archdiocese of Baltimore turned to Neil Thompson Shade, FASA President and Principal Consultant at Acoustical Design Collaborative, for help. With experience of more than 1,000 projects, many dealing with historic preservation and houses of worship, he was able to help alleviate the Basilica’s acoustic issues.
‘Breathtaking is the only word I would use to describe the architecture,’ he says. ‘Everything in the 200-year-old church’s interior had been restored to its original condition. The high, domed ceilings in the nave and above the congregation are beautiful but certainly added to the reverberation challenges.’
The church contracted with HP Electronics to install and commission four Renkus-Heinz IC16-RN digitally steerable arrays called for in the sound redesign. A member of the Iconyx Gen5 Series, the IC16-RN gives designers the power to create a system to cover problematic spaces, with up to eight steerable beams that can be individually shaped and aimed. The triple tweeter array-within-an-array design reduces the distance between high-frequency sources for vastly improved performance with consistent, broad horizontal dispersion.
After commissioning, the average room Speech Transmission Index for Public Address Systems (STIPA), a quantitative measure of speech intelligibility, increased from 0.42 (poor) to 0.55 (fair), a significant gain based solely on four loudspeakers.
‘Because the Basilica is a historic building, sensitivity to aesthetics was an important consideration when selecting new loudspeakers. We could immediately tell that the Renkus-Heinz Iconyx loudspeakers were the right way to go,’ Shade says. ‘The Basilica has a full calendar of activities and services, seven days a week, so the ease of installation and commissioning were also significant factors in the success of this project.’
More: www.renkus-heinz.com
