Dating back to 1848, Ohio’s St Augustine’s Catholic Church has seen a succession of significant renovations including replacement of its single tower with twin Gothic towers, the installation of stained glass windows and the addition of seven ceiling murals, painted by Joseph Vittur, in 1866.
The resultant church interior is highly reverberant, providing a good acoustic for its pipe organ and 78-voice choir, but a challenge to voice intelligibility. In response, St Augustine’s worked with Steve Merrill of Stage Right Productions on a new sound reinforcement system based on Community’s Entasys 200 loudspeakers and dSPEC Loudspeaker Processor.
‘The old sound system put the sound everywhere,’ Merrill says. ‘The reverb and echoes were terrible and I had to overcome these problems.’
Having used Community’s original Entasys Column Line Array on another project, Merrill knew that Entasys could project the sound directly to the people and keep it away from St Augustine’s rounded ceiling and hard floors. But he was attracted to Community’s newer Entasys 200 family because it offered several versatile models that he could use in different areas of the church. He chose Entasys 212s for the main church sanctuary and Entasys 203s for the front [chancel] area and the choir loft.
‘A single pair of Entasys 212s would have covered the entire sanctuary but I put a second pair about half-way back in the church and delayed them with the dSPEC processor,’ he says, ‘The delay makes the sound system disappear – the sound seems to come from the lector, not the loudspeakers. Now, it is great everywhere. The intelligibility is excellent and you can even hear breath noises.’
Merrill used existing electronics where possible to keep the cost down for the church but he replaced older lavalier microphones with new Audio-Technica head-worn mics and used Ashly amplifiers to power the Entasys 212s.
‘The [dSPEC] processor is amazing,’ says Greg Oen, lead technical volunteer at the church. ‘With the delay and equalisation, you don’t even notice the loudspeakers. Some of the older choir members have asked me ‘what did you do to the sound?’ because they can finally understand the message.’
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