Built in 1963, the Guardian Angel Cathedral is the home church for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas. The cathedral serves local families and Las Vegas tourists with its daily masses and other services. Its A-frame design features stained glass windows and polished tile floors. However, with the sanctuary’s 66-ft height, these features produce a high reverberation time, which benefits the choir and organ but detracts from speech intelligibility.
The cathedral’s old sound system was unable to provide acceptable voice quality in this environment. In 2015, Guardian Angel contacted Steve Keating of Mission Electronics in Las Vegas to analyse its system and recommend a course of action. Keating tested the existing system and found the sound muffled and the intelligibility poor when the sanctuary was empty – and even when it was full of people during masses.
Rather than simply repair the old system and to keep costs down, Keating recommended a new system using Community Entasys ENT212 column loudspeakers distributed along the cathedral walls. Now installed, this comprises two Community ENT212s on each side of the sanctuary and one on each side of the balcony for a total of six columns. The loudspeakers are progressively delayed to synchronise arrival times throughout the sanctuary. Keating reused the cathedral’s existing under-balcony ceiling loudspeakers and powered the system with Crown CDI amplifiers.
A Behringer X32 mixer provides auto-mixing, allowing hands-free operation for most services and a Behringer DEQ2496 DSP provides delay and system equalisation. The cathedral has four wireless microphones for clergy use, a pair of wired microphones on the lector and cantor podiums and a Denon media player with USB input for weddings and other services. A floor-mounted mic input was repurposed as an audio output for videographers.
Keating says the new system’s speech quality is clear and coverage is uniform throughout the sanctuary. A former sceptic told him, ‘the sound is great’, and the head usher commented, ‘there’s a night and day difference; we can go anywhere in the church now and understand’.
