The Old Church of St. John the Baptist, housed in a picturesque Gothic building with a striking steep-pitched roof in Zapyškis, Lithuania, is no longer used for religious purposes but it does host a busy schedule of cultural and music events — including the annual Kite Festival and Pažaislis Music Festival — that are served by a new sound reinforcement system utilizing Renkus-Heinz ICONYX loudspeakers to help combat long reverberation times and improve intelligibility.
Church staff contacted Vytautas Stasiukaitis, system designer at AV integration firm Audiotonas, to help redesign the system. “The church had very long reverberation times, and we weren’t allowed to install acoustic treatments of any kind due to its cultural designation,” explains Stasiukaitis. “That’s why the only solution for this scenario was a beam-steered loudspeaker system from Renkus-Heinz.”
Audiotonas installed and commissioned four IC8-RN digitally steerable loudspeakers called for in the audio redesign. A member of the ICONYX Gen5 Series, the IC8-RN has a triple-tweeter “array within an array” design to reduce the distance between high-frequency sources to foster improved performance with consistent, broad horizontal dispersion.
Audiotonas added two CA112S-RN 12-inch direct-radiating subwoofers to the system for the added bass response needed for festival performances. Used singly, it’s well-suited for adding bass to six- and eight-inch loudspeakers and steerable arrays, and in multiples, like the installation at St. John the Baptist, it can enhance any music system requiring a compact subwoofer approach.
“Our main goal is to provide solutions that meet the needs of the client, and I’m proud to say we were very successful in the case of the Old Church of St. John the Baptist,” Stasiukaitis concludes. “The church is over 400 years old and still looks great. Thanks to Renkus-Heinz, now it sounds great, too.”
