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Ashen White Productions Chooses Community Solutions for Hamilton Landmark Church
Community Professional loudspeakers have been installed in St Patrick's Roman Catholic Church, Hamilton, Ontario, in a system designed by Toronto-based Ashen White Productions.
Completed in 1877, St Patricks is a landmark in the city's downtown centre, and one of the finest examples of 13th century gothic revival architecture in southern Ontario. Undoubtedly a building of great beauty and local importance, in acoustical terms it presented Ashen White Productions' head of sales and installation, Warren Potter, with a large reverberant space with limitations on how and where audio equipment could be installed.
Warren Potter met with the Church leaders to help determine their needs and goals. Sound quality and coverage were the key factors, but in addition to the need for speech intelligibility the system had to be suitable for the large numbers of musical performances held in the church. The project began with clearing out the old and very inadequate system, much of which could be traced back to the 50s and 60s.
"For the new system the key element was the choice of loudspeaker system and Community Professional Loudspeakers held the answers", commented Mr Potter. "We decided on Community for several reasons. The first reason was Community had a box that fitted every need perfectly for the project - VERIS 3564 for the mains, VERIS 8 for the delays, I/O5 for the altar fill and I/O8 for the choir loft fill".
"Because of the traditional nature and layout of the church, having subwoofers was not really an option", expanded Mr Potter, "So a box with a 15-inch low-frequency driver was required to fill the room with warmth. However, going from a 15-inch LF to a horn never really works well or sounds right when you're dealing with live audio, especially for critical speech applications as in a church. Here comes VERIS 3564 to save the day, with its mid-range driver allowing the LF to be a true LF. And having the MF on a lens for directionality, rather than compression keeps everything smooth and warm, as well as projecting a sound that is close to your face even when the box is further away".
"The 3564 had no problems filling the room in the LF range, allowing us to crossover the VERIS 8 delay boxes up around 200Hz and turn them into a more of mid-high box. This also allowed the 8-inch driver to ideally reproduce the frequencies near the crossover point to the horn". Mr Potter continues. "The I/O5 is nice and small, and can be hidden from sight very easily, while still producing the volume needed to fill the required area. The I/O8 can easily fill the choir loft".
The main VERIS 3564 loudspeakers are powered by a Crest CC4000 amplifier, providing 750W/channel (8 Ohm), while the VERIS 8 delay loudspeakers in the main hall use a Crest CC2800 amplifier, giving 500W/channel. For the choir balcony, the Community I/O8 fills are served by a Crest CPX900 amplifier, as is the I/O5 loudspeaker at the altar.
Mr Potter also had an eye on the church's future needs: "Thinking ahead, the I/O8 and I/O5 loudspeakers can easily be reconfigured to act as monitors for future use. The boxes can produce the volume and the amplifier is more than large enough".
On stage, Mr Potter specified four of Community's MVP-12M 12-inch/1-inch wedge monitors, a small-profile loudspeaker that ‘has a clean look to it and can easily provide the necessary reinforcement for the needs of this church'. These provide two mixes - using a Crest CC2800 amplifier, giving 525W/channel into 8 Ohm with a single wedge per mix or 900W/channel with two wedges per mix. In all cases, the amplifier output has been limited below its maximum capacity.
Running the loudspeakers is a Xilica XP-4080 digital loudspeaker management and two graphic equalisers have also been incorporated into the set-up - an Ashly GQX-3102 for the main system and a dbx 231 for the stage monitors. Finishing off at front-of-house is a 16-channel Soundcraft GB2R analogue console; modest, but well suited to the needs of St Patrick's.
"The system sounds great", concludes Mr Potter. "Both the staff and the members of the church are thrilled with the new system, with many commenting about how nice it is to hear every word that is said during a service, whether they are in the front row or the back row. As the one who focuses the boxes, tunes the system and mixes the first couple of services/events, the system works very well with the room. The room has ‘natural warmth' to it, and it also is able to transmit low mid-range frequencies very well. It's not a ‘hang time' like you get in an arena. I attended a concert that featured a 20-to-25 person choir before we did the installation. Their natural unamplified singing could be felt in my chest both underneath the choir loft as well as at the other end of the room. So the 15-inch LF of the 3564s produce a warm sound in the room; and with the directionality of the MF and HF the services have never sounded better. No matter where in the room you are, you feel as if you are being spoken to in person, up close and personal - as opposed to being spoken to as a group through a sound system. Because we are using a Crest Audio CC4000 on the 3564s and a CC2800 on the VERIS 8s, we have lots of headroom in the amplifiers allowing them to stay nice and juicy. We can really crank it up when we need to, without drying up the rails and thinning out the sound. There's no such thing as too much headroom".
29th January 2010
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