With its oldest parts dating back to 1792, and additions in 1861, Sint-Leonardus Church is a traditional building with a beautiful interior, but its dimensions and highly reflective surfaces presented difficult acoustic problems.
The supplier Hifi-Center Melis, and installer Jan Geerts, worked closely with Olivier Massart of Community's Belgian distributor, M-Pro BeNeLux, to determine a solution that would provide the wide coverage required for the congregation with the very narrow vertical dispersion needed to avoid reflections.
Calculations showed that the entire area was best covered by just two Community Entasys FR full-range column-line-array loudspeaker systems positioned on each side of the alter, augmented by two ultra-compact Entasys 206 loudspeakers located at the sides. The church and architect were also very pleased with the system's minimal impact on the aesthetics and architecture of the building. The loudspeakers were supplied in white to match the colour of the church's columns and walls.
An Australian Monitor XA1400 is used to power the Community loudspeakers and processing is handled by a Symetrix SOLUS 8 open architecture 8x8 DSP with control via a Symetrix ARC-2e menu-driven wall panel remote. Installed microphones for the system are Clockaudio and wireless microphones are MIPRO ACT-3 series.
To reduce the time required for installation, the rack was supplied fully built by M-Pro and fine tuning support was also handled by Olivier Massart, who commented, "The client and church visitors are very pleased with the excellent audio quality, wide coverage and sound levels the system provides. It achieves very high intelligibility right to the back of the church, without additional delay lines."
(Jim Evans)
