New Sound for St. Boniface Catholic Church
Saint Boniface Catholic Church in Anaheim California is a very busy place, especially on Sundays. Holding 7 services in one day, (and many Masses during the week) they have a multicultural outreach with services in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. The beautiful and spacious sanctuary dates from 1961, and the core of the original sound system (a center cluster high above the altar) was still in service when DJL Audio/Video specialists of San Dimas CA. was brought in to design and install a new system.
St. Boniface has an active and highly-regarded choir program, hosting national choir conventions and events. One of the reasons these events are held there is because of the sanctuary’s remarkable acoustics. Of course, great acoustics for singing traditional and classical music and great acoustics for speaking can be very different from each other. The challenge in more traditional worship spaces, is to make the speaking clear and intelligible while not damaging the acoustics for traditional music.
In programming meetings with the church staff and choir director it became clear that they had been struggling with the old system for quite some time, yet were very concerned that any new system serve music performances as well as clearly amplifying the spoken word without negatively impacting the church’s beautiful interior. Quite a tall order, but tall orders should be our middle name! Many years earlier, we had designed a very successful system for a Catholic church with very difficult acoustics, and so, enjoying a challenge, we got many more challenges to come, and they have become excellent clients for us.
Large-scale multi-channel DSP had not been dreamed of yet in 1961 (at least in the audio industry) so system design was pretty much restricted to center-cluster or left-right arrays. Center-cluster dominated among knowledgeable system designers because this arrangement could be counted upon to deliver the best intelligibility then available in an acoustically-live room.
There are, of course, also major problems with center-clusters in long and acoustically-live buildings. Simply generating enough energy in the air to reach the back of the room from a center-cluster in the front lights up the room’s reverb and echo modes in a loud and intrusive manner. In addition to this issue, there is significant absorption of the higher frequencies by the air itself over distance. This causes the room EQ to tilt more and more towards the bass as highs are attenuated with distance. The result, no matter the intent and skill of the system designers, was a boomy, dull-sounding system, full of echoes and reverb, and often unlistenable in rear seats. Not their fault, it was the best that could be done in 1961.
The development of extremely powerful DSP devices at the end of the 20th Century opened up all sorts of new design possibilities, some with much promise to solve many of the issues in acoustically-difficult buildings like this.
By using smaller speakers, more of them, and smaller, precisely-defined coverage areas, we are able to have each speaker move much less air than a center-cluster system, and take advantage of the natural attenuation of sound in air to drastically reduce the amount of reverb and echo generated by the sound system in the building. There are extraordinarily complex DSP requirements to make such a system work, but today’s better processors are more than up to the task.
St. Boniface ended up with 22 speakers including the platform, balcony, sacristy, foyer, and cry rooms. For the larger, front portion of the traditional cross-shaped building we selected Tannoy’s V12 speakers in white. These are extremely compact, yet powerful, dual-concentric speakers (having a true horn and compression driver firing through the center dome of the 12-inch woofer) that we have used for many projects. Because they are so compact, they have minimal impact on the visual quality of the room, yet they cover their assigned area beautifully with their conical dispersion pattern. Tannoy DI6 DC speakers were selected for the delay/distributed portion of the main sanctuary. These Dual-Concentric speakers are very compact, sound great, and were available in white. We selected Tannoy DI5 and DI5t speakers for the peripheral systems because they are even more compact and a good sonic match to the rest of the speakers.
System DSP management is via 2 BSS Soundweb 9088 processors and amplification is provided by QSC’s CX702, CX302, and 4-channel CX404 series. The rack was provided with new dedicated, isolated-ground power and a true-sinewave, uninterruptible power backup for the Soundwebs, assuring dependable service despite most power problems likely to be encountered.
One thing that is immediately evident in these older churches is that they were never designed to have speakers all over them, and rarely is any easy way found to install conduit to all the speaker locations. At St. Boniface, this was enough of an issue, with conduit inside, outside, and through the building, that it was decided to engage the services of Christopher Lawrence of North American Power & Lighting to not only provide the new power to the rack, but also, with our crew assisting, install the numerous conduit runs throughout the building and pull the speaker cable. We had worked with NAPL before and found them hard-working, competent, friendly and professional once again.
Conduit install and speaker cabling took a bit over one week, during which we also built the rack, installed the speakers and started on the DSP design file. The second week was dedicated to the remaining speaker installs, polarity verification, mic installs, new mic cable install, and then system testing, measurement, and EQ and delay settings.
There was a new Allen & Heath WZ3:16:2 mixer in a portable rack installed in the choir loft for their use, a mute switch for the choir loft speakers so those may be silenced during use of the new Countryman hanging Choir Mics. Choir Director Emett Loera requested the option to not have the choir in any of the main sanctuary speakers except for the 2 front ones (where they needed some reinforcement due to the distance) We found a creative way to do this by having 2 signal paths created in the DSP for the choir mixer. Hence, you simply dial the mixer left for the whole building, and right for the front speakers only. This has been very successful in achieving a balanced sound throughout the building during choir and solo performances.
New mics were the Countryman E6 directional earsets with Shure ULXS wireless transmitters and receivers all routed directly to the Soundweb for maximum processing flexibility and simplicity of control. New Countryman Podium mics for both the Ambo and Cantor locations and a Crown PCC170 Boundary mic for the altar were also selected, also routing directly to the Soundweb mic inputs.
My favorite portion of a new sound project is always playing it for the first time for the client. Fr. Timothy Freyer is the Pastor of St. Boniface church, and he was one of the first to hear it. His glowing responses and huge smile, made all the hard work worth it and we spent the rest of the afternoon playing the system for other staff and Priests as the word spread that the new system was up and sounded great.
I must say though, that my favorite moment on this project was when an older Hispanic lady, who clearly did not speak English well, got my attention, and slowly said: new speakers, very nice! good speakers, very very nice! I thanked her profusely, knowing that our job here was done.
In this economy, we are all only as good as our last job. We must hit a home run every single time out. This can be nerve-racking, but does any client deserve any less?
Donald C. Cicchetti
Systems Design and Engineering
DJL Audio/Video Specialists
San Dimas, CA
www.DJLAV.com
