With its striking architecture, the Sagrada Familia is a particularly sensitive structure. Considerable care had to be taken with the installation, so the church's custodians contacted Gaplasa, having heard of their success with a number of other sensitive installations in the area, including those at Barcelona Cathedral and Basilica de Montserrat.
"Along with a number of other companies, we were invited to look at how the church's problems could be solved," says Gaplasa's Óscar Valero. "Ultimately, the project we proposed was deemed the best solution."
As part of the system, Gaplasa installed Denon DN-F300 and DN-F400 digital audio playback systems and a DN-F650R professional solid state recorder.
Selected for the playback of music during tourist visits and special events, the DN-F300 and DN-F400 are both able to read MP3 files and uncompressed WAV files from SD or SDHC cards, with the DN-F300 also having the option to read from USB drives. The DN-F650R, meanwhile, offers recording to and between SD/SDHC flash cards and external USB drives and is used for recording events and concerts.
A company that has a long-term contract with the Sagrada Familia performed the installation of the loudspeakers and cabling. However, the challenges associated with the installation of the remainder of the system, which included racks, commissioning and programming, were considerable and as specialist expertise was required, this was undertaken directly by Gaplasa,
"The Sagrada Familia is one of the most complex systems we have designed, in terms of acoustics," says Óscar. "The church is so big, the air volume is so high, and the construction materials are so reflective, that the result is a huge reverberation time. This makes it very difficult to achieve good intelligibility parameters."
By spending many hours using Bose Modeler Software, Gaplasa was able to design the best sound system in terms of intelligibility, the most important parameter in a system created for speech.
"We also needed to be able to integrate playback and record functions with the Biamp control system we installed, allowing the operators to control the system remotely via the control application," Óscar concludes. "The DN-F400 and DN-F650R allowed us to do this and, as the quality of Denon products is well-proven, we knew they were the ideal solution."
(Jim Evans)
