The installation was supervised by DAT AB, Renkus-Heinz’s Swedish distributor. DAT installed the new Renkus-Heinz ST7/94 (90 x 40 degree dispersion) loudspeaker and a series of distributed nearfield speakers in the church, to minimize the effects of a long reverb time while projecting vocal and musical clarity throughout the building.
Faced with a limited budget and the requirement for a compact, simple, but state-of-the-art sound system, DAT measured the reverberation time at almost 4.5 seconds and created an EASE model of the church. Their conclusion was that one single speaker with added nearfield speakers would be the optimum solution. Robert Nilsson, head of DAT AB, explains: "The church is built entirely of stone with highly reflective areas everywhere. Even the brick floor placed serious demands on the sound system design. The best way to solve this was to use a full-range enclosure with a large format horn and tightly controlled dispersion as the main sound source.
"Since the budget was tight, I knew that if we only proposed one solution with a comparatively high price tag, we wouldn't get the job. So earlier this year, I set up a demonstration of different speakers and different system solutions in the church - a single speaker plus smaller distributed cabinets, a completely distributed system, a delay line system, and so on - for the church people. After explaining the various options, they heard demonstrations of both full-range music and speech, and were asked to comment on the results. They all voted for the solution based on a single Renkus-Heinz speaker, which was actually a conventionally powered CT7 for the demo, plus small distributed speakers. The problem now was that there was no place to put the amplifier rack. At the same time Renkus-Heinz previewed the new self-powered ST Series at Frankfurt and the solution was clear: this was the perfect speaker for the job since it had the processor-controlled amplifier built in. Using a Renkus-Heinz D26 controller I set the system EQ which incorporated settings for the smaller speakers, and preset different set-ups for applications like music concerts and speech."
(Ruth Rossington)
