In a Roman Catholic ceremony to mark the beatification of Guadalupe Ortiz de Landazuri, audio rental firm Delta Sound Spain employed a Bose Professional ShowMatch DeltaQ system to provide full-bandwidth sound and audience-area coverage for the event. Landazuri was the first lay member and the first female member of the Catholic church’s Opus Dei body to be beatified. Cardinal Angelo Becciu, prefect of the Congregation of the Causes of Saints, represented the Holy Father at the beatification ceremony.
The ceremony took place at Palacio de Vistalegre, a multipurpose venue that originated as a bullring (and therefore has a 270-degree seating aspect); the space is usually configured for 9,000 attendees, but was reconfigured to accommodate 11,000 for this special occasion. To meet the needs of the Vatican for the special event, a sacristy, chapel, press area and volunteer hosting room were specially constructed.
The multiple-array sound reinforcement system set up for the event included a total of 40 ShowMatch modules configured in two main 12-box left/right arrays supplemented by a total of 12 ShowMatch SMS118 bass modules for low frequency extension. Multiple outfill arrays were made of four additional ShowMatch modules. Additional ShowMatch loudspeakers were used as ground-based frontfills, with two modules each mounted on multiple pairs of SMS118 subs.
Jose De La Torre, CEO of Delta Sound Spain, comments, “With such a high RT60 measurement and a very reverberant space, the challenge was to achieve high intelligibility in what is a notoriously difficult room from a wide range of public speakers, many with very soft voices. I chose Bose ShowMatch because in reality there is simply no other system of that compact size where you can choose both the vertical and horizontal coverage in every speaker to achieve uniformity at all distances. You really have to hear it to believe it.”
