The 1,200-seat worship sanctuary of St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church in suburban Houston has been oufitted with a new sound reinforcement system incorporating Renkus-Heinz ICLive X steerable loudspeaker arrays in a project by Texas-based integration firm Covenant Communications.
The sanctuary presents a challenging acoustic environment, with stained glass windows depicting the 14 Stations of the Cross flanking the sides, while an altar featuring an ornate carving of the Last Supper dominates the dais. The high-peaked, wood-paneled ceiling and other hard surfaces combine to impact speech intelligibility.
Church leaders recently approached Shawn Mullins, founder and CEO of Covenant Communications, which has worked with Renkus-Heinz products since the company’s inception, to redesign the audio system. Mullins recommended the ICLive X Series steerable arrays to meet the goals of high intelligibility combined with even coverage.
“One of the changes St. Mary Magdalene was making to their worship services was including more live music, so we wanted to ensure that the loudspeakers could reproduce full bandwidth audio with an emphasis on high speech intelligibility,” explains Mullins. “It’s a very lively room with a lot of hard surfaces. Because the space is so wide and the ceilings are so high, we wanted a wall-mounted line array solution. After looking at two or three manufacturers that offer active line arrays, we felt the ICLive X was the best fit for the sanctuary’s needs.”
Covenant Communications installed two arrays at the front of the nave, each comprised of three ICLX and one ICLLX, approximately nine feet from the finished floor to the bottom of the array. Both steerable array modules include multiple 19 mm compression drivers on Acoustic Source Multiplier (ASM) waveguides coaxially mounted in front of 8-inch woofers. The proprietary ASM waveguide is designed to minimize inter-driver spacing to help produce gradient-lobe-free performance up to very high frequencies. Mainwhile, the woofer arrangements are engineered to maintain significant pattern control down to lower frequencies.
The church requested a demonstration before installation, so Covenant Communications temporarily set up one array on a column. The contrast between the old system and just one column was stark, and the church was impressed with the performance, stating, “It sounds better with just one column than our entire sound system.”
“Honestly, we expected the result and were happy that it matched our expectations. We knew what we were getting into,” Mullins says. “Renkus-Heinz was one of our first manufacturing relationships, and we were an early adopter of the ICONYX Series. One of the reasons that we continue to value our relationship with Renkus-Heinz is their superior level of customer service. Their desire to be a partner in the process is continually and considerably higher than most manufacturers.”
