SWITZERLAND – An 18th century (1753-7) protestant church in Switzerland has become one of Europe’s latest converts to Renkus-Heinz’s unique Iconyx digitally steerable array, its users discovering that the system has opened up a new era of speech intelligibility in a room that had defeated all earlier attempts to tame it.

The installation of a single Iconyx IC16/8, which packs in eight individually amplified, processed and digitally steerable pairs of 4 inch dual-concentric active drivers, has transformed the usability of The Temple in Yverdon-les-Bains, a large, rectangular 800-capacity church owned by the city council which has a flat ceiling with wide, curved edges and an L-shaped balcony. The room is generally used with the congregation standing across the 30 metre width of the room, which measures some 18m front to back and 22 metres from altar to balcony.

In charge of the system design and installation is Swiss professional audio sales, installation and rental firm Studio Equipment, headed by Englishman Terry Nelson – also well known as a pro audio writer.

“The church is basically a big box,” says Nelson, “and it’s a very reverberant space that’s easily excited just by normal speech, which makes it especially difficult to reinforce. The surfaces are all hard walls and ceilings, and when a pastor speaks he has to do so very slowly, clearly and quietly".

“The task we faced was not to simply install a sound reinforcement system to raise the sound levels, because that would over-excite the room and lower intelligibility even further. We needed a solution that would encourage the person to actually speak more quietly, confident that his words were coming across clearly through a carefully optimized loudspeaker system – it’s really a combination of technology and psychology.”

Nelson attended an Iconyx demonstration and says that within 30 seconds he had decided that this was the ideal solution for The Temple: “so we went ahead and specified a 16/8 and it’s been a great success.”

The IC16/8 is mounted two metres above ground level on the wall some two metres behind the pastor’s position. Using Renkus-Heinz BeamWare software, Nelson tailored the loudspeaker’s coverage to provide two output lobes, one focused on the ground floor while the second beam is directed at the balcony, reserved for special occasions. Horizontal coverage is 110 degrees and the cabinet is angled slightly away from the wall and offset from the centreline to effectively cover 95% of the congregation area.

The installation was completed by an Allan & Heath GR2 mixer, two channels of AKG WMS 400 radio mics and a Marantz CD player. To provide extra balcony coverage for ‘concert mode’, a pair of Electro-Voice ZX1s is mounted on the organ loft balcony.

Having found the technological solution for the space, Nelson then had to address the psychological aspect of convincing the system’s users to speak more quietly. “We’ve had to educate people who use the system, because there’s a natural tendency to raise one’s voice when addressing a large congregation. The whole point with the Iconyx is get them speak more quietly and therefore excite the room less, while the Iconyx carries the intelligibility across the room".

“So we’ve been experimenting with different types of microphone, in particular very slimline headset boom mics to get the microphone even closer to the mouth than you can with cravat mics, and course the microphone follows the person speaking when they turn their head. Even though they’re standing in front of the speaker it’s not sound from the speaker that’s the problem, it’s the natural sound of the room getting into the mic".

“The first thing that really confirmed the choice was when we had somebody speaking in a normal conversational voice. I was at the back of the balcony and I could hardly understand a single word they were saying, and then we switched on the Iconyx and suddenly I could hear every word".

“And shortly after we installed the Iconyx, a musical group brought in their own PA system because they needed more vocal mics, so we were able to do an A/B between the Iconyx and their PA, and it was exactly the same story. You could hardly understand a word on their PA and the moment the Pastor using the Iconyx took over you suddenly heard every word – which really brought home to the church people how good the new system is.”