PROJECTS
Where old meets new
in He wi se au po th fu co S fu bu fix Th of “A im “T en Th re wo pa no th ha br us D ar co to an m an
St Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry, Northern Ireland, has undergone an extensive technical systems upgrade with xC-Series speakers from d&b audiotechnik
St Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry, Northern Ireland THERE’S NO DENYING THAT THE acoustics of any house of worship built in the 19th century will be problematic. Thankfully, today’s audio technology has evolved to the point that the reflections and reverberations in these old stone buildings can be brought under control. One such case is St Eugene’s Cathedral, the mother
church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Derry in Northern Ireland, which opened in 1873. The HOW’s previous sound reinforcement system had never performed satisfactorily, with generations of congregations struggling with the acoustics inside the soaring interior. As part of a significant architectural refurbishment, the church’s
management team turned to acoustical consultant Michael Kielty of Belfast-based MK Audio. Kielty recommended a distributed system and contacted Absolute Technologies for a specific solution recommendation that would meet the church’s requirements. Absolute Technologies, with its experience of similar reverberant spaces such as Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin to numerous smaller churches, had an immediate understanding of the challenges. Through these previous installations, the SI had become familiar with the capabilities of the xC-Series column loudspeakers from d&b audiotechnik. Absolute Technologies’ installation manager, Colin McKendry, supported by Oran Burns from d&b’s Application Support team, made an initial design for the church using d&b ArrayCalc software to predict coverage and decide on suitable loudspeaker positions. Following this, an in-situ system demonstration was arranged, which confirmed the ArrayCalc predictions. The design uses an inner pair of d&b 24C-E cabinets at the front and an outer pair of 24C serving the aisles; further down the room are two
more pairs of 24Cs as delays, again arranged as inner and outer pairs. The system is powered by two d&b D10 amplifiers. “In a big, highly reverberant room like this, one of the challenges is to stop reflection off the high ceiling, which can be heard as an annoying echo from above,” explained McKendry. “The standard d&b 24C cabinet has six 4-inch LF drivers and an HF line array, giving us pattern control down below 400Hz. The ‘E’ is an extension to the LF drivers, which sits at the top of the 24C, giving another octave of pattern control, which helps to combat that problem. “While a lot of column loudspeakers lose pattern control at around 2.5kHz, forcing the engineer to EQ out much of the lower-frequency information to achieve intelligibility, the cardioid characteristic of the xC-Series extends that horizontal pattern control all the way down to the low frequencies. The system’s main use is for speech, but also occasionally acoustic music. The d&b system handles it all perfectly; the tonal quality is excellent and the dispersion is very well-controlled.” For control, the brief requested simplicity, with as little user
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