Sweetest Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church in Detroit, a large and impressive Gothic Revival venue on the National Register of Historic Places, has a cathedral-style sanctuary now outfitted with Renkus-Heinz ICONYX Gen5 loudspeakers that replace an inadequate and outdated sound system.
“It was very difficult to understand anything anywhere in the building,” explains Steve Newby, principal of family-owned AV systems integrator Annunciation Audio-Visual Services, which designed and built a new system for the church. “We have used Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers before, and we knew the solution would be Renkus-Heinz ICONYX Gen5 loudspeakers because of their digital beam-steering and clarity.”
Newby reached out to Mike Somerville, his rep at McFadden Sales, and Somerville helped set up a demo. “We showed them ICONYX IC24-RDs for the demo but we knew the space required a pair of IC32-24-RD to get the full robust vocal reinforcement they needed,” Newby recalls. “The church leaders had been told the previous system would work, and it didn’t, so they needed to actually hear the new system to be convinced. After the demo they were ready to go with ICONYX. In fact, the IC24-RDs sounded so good that the hard part was explaining why they needed the larger IC32-24-RD arrays.”
The church is 88 feet tall and 202 feet long on the exterior, and 90 feet wide for the main body of the nave, while the transept is 188 feet wide. “For the size, it’s fairly acoustically friendly,” says Newby, “partly because the transept isn’t the rectangle you normally would see in a cruciform-shaped building. Its corners are at 45 degree angles, so it is almost octagonal but not so much so that it turns this into an in-the-round type building.
“Front arrays normally hit the back wall of a transept pretty hard but with the front and back walls of the transept at a 45-degree angle, it softens some of the early reflections and provides the width we need, despite being further from the seats in that location. This is still a long, mammoth building, and there are dead spots. But as ‘caves’ go, it’s a better-sounding ‘cave.'”
Renkus-Heinz’ IC32-24-RD arrays incorporate 19 4-inch coaxial transducers, each with three high-frequency tweeters plus five 4-inch low/mid-frequency transducers, progressively spaced. With 24 amplifier and DSP channels and multiple beams and acoustic beam centers, Newby’s team was able to cover the entire nave with just one IC32-24-RD on each side of the sanctuary, while minimizing reflections.
“We criss-crossed the left and right arrays a little, as it was the best way to get around the blind spots behind the two rows of substantial columns,” Newby adds. “With the width of the transepts and the nave, we didn’t have horrific overlap. But some overlap is necessary because seats are masked from their near-side array, and we need the far-side array to cover those masked areas.”
Since the system is almost entirely used for speech reinforcement, subwoofers were not required. Loudspeaker management and processing are entirely handled by the arrays’ onboard DSP and Renkus-Heinz’ RHAON II System Manager software. All audio connections are analog. Microphone processing and mixing is provided by a Symetrix Radius DSP, with audio distributed to the speakers via Dante.
“ICONYX Gen5 was definitely the right choice for this space,” Newby concludes. “Renkus-Heinz’ digital beam steering technology enabled us to cover the entire sanctuary, transept and all, wth just two arrays, including dealing with the blind spots and hard surfaces. IC32-24-RDs are slim and low-profile, as well, so they’re not visually obtrusive. Best of all, Sweetest Heart of Mary finally has the clear, intelligible audio they’ve long wanted, and they’re delighted.”
