Intrinsic to the project was replacing the church's 25 year-old sound system. Serving as Mother Church to the Diocese, as well as parish church for Sioux Falls and other surrounding parishes, St. Joseph's masses services are well attended by hundreds of parishioners. The new sound system had to provide high speech intelligibility and crystal clear sound to every seat in the house.
The project proved quite challenging, according to Peter Borchard of MuSonics Audio. MuSonics has designed audio solutions for many large cathedrals across the country.
"The church has a lot of reflective surfaces that resulted in a six second reverberation time, making it one of the more reverberant in the US and creating significant intelligibility issues," reports Borchard.
The historic cathedral is known for its magnificent architecture featuring imported Italian marble floors and columns, massive arched ceilings, and huge stained glass windows. It was vital to St. Joseph's that the new audio system blend aesthetically so as not to diminish the visual impact of the church's stunning architecture. "Needless to say, it was critical that the new sound system would in no way interfere with the church's aesthetics," says Borchard.
An Iconyx high performance digitally steerable array system by Renkus-Heinz proved to be the audio solution for the cathedral.
The system, installed by Brookings, SD-based Audio Connections, used a combination of Iconyx loudspeakers - two IC-32, two IC-24 and six IC-8 loudspeakers - wall-mounted throughout the cathedral. Iconyx uses Renkus-Heinz's steerable multiple beam technology to provide full even coverage throughout the venue. The slim, low-profile column speakers are custom painted to match the cathedral walls, rendering them almost invisible.
(Jim Evans)
