[ATTACH=CONFIG]196798.vB5-legacyid=6116[/ATTACH]Tyler, TX, February 2013…. The majestic white columns and stately brick edifice of First Presbyterian Church have welcomed generations of worshipers in this east Texas town for nearly a century. Recently the church’s much-beloved 650-seat sanctuary underwent a major makeover that included new seating and décor, and a new sound system based around the Renkus-Heinz Iconyx digitally steered column array loudspeakers.
“It’s a beautiful, traditional, high-ceilinged space, and spoken word intelligibility has always been a bit of a challenge,” explains Derek Anderson of Longview, TX-based Sound Logic Integrations. As Anderson observes, until recently the technology didn’t exist to address the issues. “They put in a fairly elaborate system around ten years ago, and even though it was state-of-the-art for the time, it never really solved the problem.”
Acoustical design firm Kirkegaard Associates of Chicago were brought in to design a new system for the room. “Aesthetics was a big concern,” says Anderson. “The previous system clashed badly with the room’s architecture, and they were determined to avoid that mistake again.”
More than a dozen speakers in the previous system were replaced by a single pair of Iconyx IC24-R-II columns on either side of the proscenium. “The room is fairly deep, and we chose the IC24 because it gave us excellent control over directivity,” says Anderson. “We were really able to steer the sound to cover only the seating areas, without hitting the walls and floors and other reflective surfaces.”
Installation of the Iconyx system was simple and straightforward, a tremendous asset considering the tight schedule. “We had a window of only a few weeks to install the system, so we were quite happy with how easy it all went in,” says Anderson. “We finished literally only a few hours before the first service.”
Anderson says the IC24’s low profile certainly met the aesthetics challenge head-on. “The day we were finishing up the install, some of the church elders walked in and asked me where we were going to hang the speakers,” he reports. “They didn’t even see them until I pointed them out.”
Of course, the true test is in the sound, and the Iconyx has scored high marks there as well. “Everyone has been very happy with the results,” says Anderson. “They went from using more than thirty hearing assist systems to using about five or six.”
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Headquartered in Foothill Ranch, California, Renkus-Heinz, Inc. is the worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of audio operations networks, digitally steerable arrays, powered and non-powered loudspeakers, system specific electronics and fully integrated Reference Point Array systems.
