Built in a traditional neo-gothic style and completed in April 2008, the Queen of Peace Croatian Franciscan Centre is now home to 1200 families from the area's Croatian community. "It's an extraordinary church," says Father Stjepan Pandzic. "Unfortunately the sanctuary, though aesthetically beautiful, is so reverberant that the 3000 plus congregation has been having difficulty hearing exactly what Father Stjepan has had to say since day one."
Enter Mississauga, Ontario based, RP Dynamics. While not a huge company, they've grown consistently, says Cynthia Wong, RP's accounts manager, cultivating a reputation for perfection and passion that allows them to continue to grow, even in troubling economic times.
Though a relatively new building, aesthetics had clearly taken precedence over acoustics in its initial construction. "It's probably one of the most reverberant spaces that anyone would work with," Wong says. "There are no soft surfaces in the sanctuary." Owing to aesthetic concerns and budget, however, reducing the reverberant nature of the space with acoustic treatments was never an option.
In a conversation between Wong, RP Dynamics owner and project manager, Roland Danner, and senior tech, Mike Sones, it was decided that a Tannoy QFlex 40 was the way to go.
Rather than simply drawing the spec up on paper, RP brought Tannoy's QFlex solution to the church for a demonstration, using scaffolding to rough in its eventual placement and to demonstrate the benefits of the self-powered, digitally steerable loudspeaker array in a boots on the ground fashion. Even during the demo there was an initial, drastic improvement, Wong says. "We've tried other steerable arrays in the past. We're very impressed with this one. It's superior. We just hung it straight down and were still able to steer to the first couple of pews, whereas with a lot of boxes we can't do that."
While the initial plan was to swap out the entire system, because of budget, total replacement was scrapped in favour of upgrading and reusing existing equipment whenever possible. "We reprogrammed their existing Ashly DSP, added a surge protector, cleaned up their cabling, took down their two main speakers and replaced them with one QFlex 40." QFlex also enabled RP Dynamics to blow out two of four pre-existing transept speakers.
Completed in four days during the beginning of April 2009, the system absolutely had to be in place and functioning on Palm Sunday, and it was. The verdict was overwhelmingly positive. Tucked right up close to the ceiling above the sanctuary's imposing centre archway, the QFlex 40 passed with flying colours.
(Jim Evans)
