Saint Gerald Catholic Church
Location
Ralston, NE
Facility Scope
900-seat house of worship
Objectives
The high ceilings and glasswork of the church lent itself to musical performances, but not to spoken word presentations. A sound solution was required to overcome the space’s acoustics.
Outcome
With the addition of the ENT-FR column loudspeakers, the church was able to implement incredible audio for all church activities with hardware that didn’t distract from the classical lines of the building’s design.
Equipment
- Community ENT-FR column loudspeakers
- Community ceiling subwoofers
- AudiaFLEX digital signal processor
Located in Ralston, Nebraska, just outside of Omaha, Saint Gerald Catholic Church makes a striking impression with its high ceilings, ornate glasswork, and classical lines. Built in 1995, the church lies near the geographic center of a large parish and seats 900 worshippers. Five weekend services are held there, in addition to daily masses.
Music plays an important role for the church’s parishioners, with the Saint Gerald Liturgical Singers and Musicians performances being a highlight every weekend. The sanctuary’s acoustics enhance the sound quality of both the choir and organ; unfortunately, they also make understanding sermons and other spoken word difficult. To best serve all church activities,
[The] source needed to be very directive and aesthetically pleasing. Those criteria are what led us to Community loudspeakers from Biamp.
MICAH YOST Electronic Contracting Company
The acoustics of Saint Gerald Catholic Church posed a challenge for Electronic Contracting Company, which designed and installed the new sound system. As mentioned previously, the sanctuary was highly reverberant, and its previous system lacked the directionality needed to overcome this issue. According to sales engineer Micah Yost of Electronic Contracting Company, it was also essential that any sound system work preserve the church’s aesthetics.
“We needed to add a line source to the room, because that didn’t exist in the sound system,” said Yost. “That source needed to be very directive and aesthetically pleasing. Those criteria are what led us to Community loudspeakers from Biamp. It was very easy to paint and hide, and it was very directive.”
Yost, who led a team of six on the installation, chose to build a solution with the ENT-FR column line source loudspeaker, using the ENT-FR drivers as a line source. A time-aligned distributed system of eight ceiling-mounted Community subwoofers handled the low frequency content. This enabled the ENT-FR systems to control frequencies over 250 Hz in front while also enabling the ability to distribute lower frequencies.
Yost explained how the new system greatly enhanced intelligibility and control. “The biggest characteristic was the directivity of the piece. It allowed us to put sound wherever we wanted it and not where we didn’t. It’s a very reverberant room, so we had to be able to point the sound and put it right on the listeners and not have it bouncing all over the place.”
The compact size of the ENT-FR column blends perfectly with the church’s interior. The installation team painted the cabinets to match the walls, making the loudspeakers almost impossible to detect. With a Biamp AudiaFLEX handling DSP, the new sound system provided much better pattern control in the church. “Previously in the church they had multiple speakers in the ceiling that were throwing sound all over the place,” said Yost. “With the ENT-FR, we were able to bring that all to the front into the loudspeaker. It was very clean and directive and controlled.”