In 1964 the campus, with its 1850s-vintage fort, was expanded with the construction of an 800-seat crown chapel, replete with massive 45-foot dome and transept wings. The building's marble and plaster interior creates an acoustical environment that works magnificently to enhance the Order's celebrated pipe organ. But as their needs have changed over time, those same acoustics have created a whole new set of challenges.
"It's a beautiful facility that has always been renowned for its musical acoustics," explains Scott Wright, President of Platteville, WI-based Lifeline Audio Video Technologies. "But in today's world they're using it more and more often for spoken word and piano-vocal recitals, and it simply wasn't designed for that."
"It's a very large room, with a reverb time of more than four seconds," adds Lifeline VP Mike Mair, "and as they've been doing more spoken word and piano-oriented services, vocal intelligibility has become more of an issue."
To be fair, the room was not completely without sound reinforcement. But the originaldecades-old speaker system had never been adequate for the space. "The reverb time was markedly longer in the middle of the room, where the dome is higher," Mair explains, "and as a result many of the sisters were seating themselves around the edges near the transepts, where they could hear a bit better, and leaving the centre of the room pretty much empty."
Lifeline's solution was a simple and elegant one - a pair of Renkus-Heinz Iconyx IC24-R digitally steerable array loudspeaker systems. The Iconyx arrays, mounted on either side of the altar, addressed virtually all of the chapel's long-standing issues.
"We've used Iconyx in a number of previous projects, and have always been successful with them," Wright says. "They are without a doubt our choice for a steerable array, and we feel they are the best one on the market."
A demo was arranged via Carl Schwartz of rep firm Frequency Sales. "We arranged a demo for about 70 people," says Wright. "They were definitely sceptical, since they've tried so many systems over the years. But we've done a few projects with them in the past, and the results have always been successful, so they trusted us."
"We just plugged a mic directly into the Iconyx, with flat EQ," says Mair. "The results were remarkable. You could see eyes popping open all over the room. They were just astounded."
"I got up at the lectern and read a few things, and they still couldn't believe what they were hearing," says Wright. "At first, several of the sisters were saying, 'oh, it's just because he's got a very booming, male voice.' So we had Sister Priscilla Wood get up and do a reading, and they all said, 'yes! That's what she sounds like.' After that, the next question was whether we could we get it installed by Thursday."
A Biamp Nexia presentation mixer provides microphone inputs for their wireless, pulpit and choir mics. "They're very happy with the simplicity of the system," says Mair. "It's very easy for them to run."
"They had waited many, many years to find the right solution," says Wright. "Essentially, they waited until technology caught up with their needs. Finally, with Iconyx, we found a solution that really worked for them. They weren't looking for a minor improvement; they were looking for a night-and-day difference. And that's exactly what they got."
(Jim Evans)
