As a pilgrimage site, and a church holding mass twice daily and Liturgy of the Hours four times daily, the sanctuary at Marytown – a ministry of the Conventual Franciscans Friars of Saint Bonaventure Province in Libertyville, Illinois – is a busy if peaceful place.
When its sound reinforcement system failed, Marytown – or the National Shrine of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, as it is more formally known – called on CavComm Audio Visual for help – and quickly decided that it was time to replace the aging analogue set-up with a more modern alternative. It new system is based around a Symetrix SymNet Solus 16 open architecture, standalone audio DSP platform and Tannoy loudspeakers.
‘The layout of Marytown’s beautiful sanctuary is unique,’ says CavComm Audio Visual President, Mike Canfield. ‘In front of the chancel alter area, the pews are perpendicular, and the pulpit and Father’s chair are situated towards the middle of the nave. Just before a major holy day, their mixer failed. I brought in a SymNet Solus 16 so they could get through the busy season. Having the flexibility of the open-architecture SymNet Solus 16 was great because we could use it in place of the old gear and we could still use the existing speakers and amplification. New Tannoy VLS15 passive line array speakers were added a few months later. I favour Symetrix processing based partly on its broadcast industry heritage, which requires products to have a quiet, neutral performance and the Symetrix processors are intuitive to program.’
Two Symetrix ARC-2e wall panel remote controls provide selection and volume control for a collection of seven Shure wired and wireless microphones and a CD/iPod deck. An eight-channel Lab.gruppen C10.8x amplifier powers the system. Because it was so easy to program the SymNet Solus 16, Canfield ran a few experimental
set-ups with the Marytown friars. ‘I put in a gated mixing design for a few weeks and then tried a gain sharing design,’ he said. ‘Then I asked which they liked better. Because so many different people with different speaking voices and volumes use the system, they felt the gain-sharing design worked better. It was nice to have that kind of flexibility.’
The sanctuary installation performed sufficiently well that a smaller DSP system was added in the dining/meeting room. ‘It’s very simple, and a Jupiter 4 together with a Symetrix ARC-2e wall panel remote control allows them to play music and have a microphone input for meetings,’ Canfield says. ‘Right now it’s just two inputs and two outputs, but they might expand the system to include some outdoor landscaping speakers or another input. Everything that the Jupiter 4 contains couldn’t be touched by an analogue system for anywhere near its price. It’s a tremendous value.’
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