At a Historic San Diego Church, K-array Loudspeaker Solution Delivers Outstanding Intelligibility

Nov. 21, 2011 - PRLog -- San Diego, Calif. – November 21, 2011 – Audio specialist Sennheiser announced that the historic Our Lady of the Rosary Roman Catholic Church, a landmark in the Little Italy neighborhood of San Diego since the 1920s, recently replaced its sound reinforcement system with K-array Installation series components. The new system, comprising eight K-array KT22-C Tornado 2-inch point source compact speakers, two K-array KKS50 line array bass elements and a K-array KA10-10 Class D amplifier, was gifted to the church in memory of the late Ross Ritto, founder and CEO of Escondido-based production sound and A/V systems design-build firm Sound Image, by his wife, Katie.

Jason Schmidlapp, of Sound Image, together with John Borja, Area Sales Manager of Installed Sound, Sennheiser, recommended the K-array system for the installation. The voice and music reinforcement system, which also included a Sennheiser i40 gooseneck podium microphone topped with an ME 35 super-cardioid capsule, was installed under the supervision of Dave Paviol, Director of Operations, Sound Image.

The new K-array system replaced an aging setup of three-way speaker enclosures, installed high up along only one wall, which offered poor intelligibility. The miniature K-array KT22-C speakers, which provide 90 x 90-degree coverage, and K-array KKS50 subs, which each house four 4-inch drivers, provide seamless coverage throughout the sanctuary yet are just a fraction of the size of the previous enclosures, notes Borja. “It was David versus Goliath. We replaced the old system at approximately one-tenth the cost and with a 100 percent improvement in audio intelligibility.”

Although mounted seven feet off the floor, the new speakers are also completely unobtrusive. “We built custom enclosures for them, little triangular boxes that fit in the corners between the pillars and the side walls,” Paviol explains. “It was an interesting install in that it all had to be surface mounted, because it’s an old building. But we were able to get under the church and come up through the wood flooring, then surface mount the cables.”

Challenging acoustics, graceful audio solution
The acoustics were also challenging in the church, which is nearly 90 years old. “It’s a very old church with a lot of echo -- tile floor, plaster ceiling, stained glass and giant arches,” Paviol reports. But by installing the distributed speaker system in the optimum locations throughout the sanctuary, Sound Image was able to avoid energizing the space with excessive power, he says. “We were impressed with how seamless the K-array system is, front to back. As you walk through the soundfield the coverage is perfect.”

The laws of physics and acoustics dictated that the previous system, positioned so high above the floor, was never going to provide satisfactory intelligibility, Borja notes. But with the K-array system properly positioned, he says, “Not only did audio intelligibility go up, but when music is played the sound is balanced and extremely pleasant, without turning up the volume.”

The performance of the new system is a testament to the understanding of physical space and speaker positioning, Borja observes. But K-array’s innovative speaker and electronics technologies are equally critical to achieving superior intelligibility, and require system designers to think differently when incorporating them in their installations, he believes. “With K-array we have to have design engineers rethink not only acoustic properties but also space properties and speaker positioning. K-array is important in that the DSP allows it to be programmed for the space it is being installed in. K-array’s electronic topology is unlike anything that is out there now.”