Ashly Audio at St. Joseph University Church, Buffalo

St. Joseph University Church, located in Buffalo, is 160 years old; its current building, dedicated in 1925, holds 800 congregants. Above its traditional cross-shaped stone floor soar pillars and walls of gorgeous white stone and stained glass to a 45' plaster ceiling. The church recently got a much-needed technical upgrade designed to deal with a lingering reverb in the room. The new system features Klein + Hummel loudspeakers and a modular Ashly Protea ne24.24M digital signal processor.

The New York state-based firm AV Solutions designed and installed the new system, which replaced a collection of loudspeakers that had been in place for ten years. "The room is almost 100' long with a very tall ceiling and nothing to absorb sound except for the church members," said Karl Maciag, design engineer with AV Solutions. "The previous system was an afterthought in the glare of a major structural renovation. The loudspeakers, which were placed on every other stone column from the pulpit to the rear wall, had an inappropriately wide beam width. Even worse, none of them were delayed. Rather than dealing with the very serious challenges presented by the room's acoustics, the old system actually exacerbated them."

More than anything, St. Joseph University Church needed intelligible speech reinforcement. Members of the congregations regularly complained that sermons were difficult, and sometimes impossible, to hear. In addition, a gospel choir joined one of the services each weekend, tying into the house sound system via the output from an on-stage mixer. The smear of arrival times induced by the un-delayed sound system was like an extra helping of mud heaped up on a mud pie.

To begin with, Maciag specified Klein + Hummel Pro X 6 N loudspeakers, which have a 90-by-60-degree beam width. "Using very controlled loudspeakers with a tighter coverage pattern was a big help," he said. "We were able to aim them very precisely so as to excite ears and not walls." A t rack of Crown CTs 600 amplifiers provides power. An Ashly Protea ne24.24M DSP delivers all of the frequency-domain controls, to remove energy that detracts from intelligibility and all of the time-domain delays to synchronize the direct sound waves throughout the sanctuary. An Ashly WR-5 wall-mounted remote control supplies intuitive user control of input volume.