Offering both traditional and contemporary worship styles, Alabama’s Canterbury UMC has separate sanctuaries. Recently, the church engaged Twist Technology to address its ongoing issues with intelligibility of the spoken word in the main traditional sanctuary at its Mountain Brook campus.
For Twist CEO Lynn McCroskey, there were two challenges tht needed to be overcome in this design/build project: ‘First, we had to create articulation in an extremely reverberant environment,’ he explains. ‘At the same time, aesthetics were a primary concern. This is a beautiful worship space, and they did not want to see a big speaker cluster or anything like that.’
Two Renkus-Heinz Iconyx IC24-R-II digitally steerable column arrays cover the entire room, using advanced digital beam steering to direct sound to the seating areas, and away from the sidewalls, balcony facings and other reflective surfaces. And the low-profile Iconyx design enabled Twist to create a system that sounded good but had minimal visual impact.
‘The IC24 column is 10 feet tall, but only about six inches wide, so it’s really more like an architectural element than a loudspeaker,’ McCroskey says. ‘It’s designed to be flush-mounted to the walls, so there is no interference with the congregation’s sightlines. With the precision colour-matched paint job, they really just look like part of the building. Most people don’t even realise that there are two 10-ft speaker columns behind the altar. The church elders are very pleased and impressed.’
The Iconyx technology enabled Twist Technology to meet Canterbury’s seemingly conflicting goals of preserving the sanctuary’s big sound while creating exceptional intelligibility: ‘We’ve used the Iconyx successfully in several architecturally sensitive installations,’ McCroskey reports. ‘The directional control is a huge help with articulation, and really helps control reverberation. For a large space like this, with high, vaulted ceilings, a balcony, and hard surfaces everywhere, beam steering is the perfect solution. The pipe organ and choir music still soars, but now the spoken word can be clearly understood from every seat.’
More: www.renkus-heinz.com
