Chapel sound system gets an upgrade

When the East India Company established its training college in Hertfordshire in 1809, the original central building of the quad was used as a library. In 1862 architect Sir Arthur Blomfield was commissioned to adapt the buildings for a boarding school and repurpose the old library into a chapel, now known as Haileybury Chapel. It was rebuilt in 1876-78, after a fire caused extensive damage.

In 2022, Haileybury approached Clarity in Sound, Light and Vision to discuss upgrading the chapel's sound system. An introductory design proposal was provided which made a good starting point for discussion with the school and their electrical contractors, who would need to know where to install containment and power. A lot of design tweaking followed and plans finally came to fruition in 2028.

The chapel's challenging acoustics made it difficult to amplify services with high intelligibility and the building's aesthetics would not easily accommodate a distributed system. Beam steerable column speakers from industry leader Renkus Heinz, combined with smaller fill loudspeakers for the nooks and crannies, were utilised as the perfect solution to the problem. Tests and demonstrations were undertaken and the way forward quickly settled.

Renkus Heinz ICONYX column loudspeakers make use of digital beam steering technology that allows sound to be highly controlled and focused over a predetermined listening area. By avoiding reflective surfaces, in this case the high ceiling and in particular the dome, reverberation levels can be controlled.

Beam steering increases the forward energy of the loudspeaker to place listeners in the direct sound output field of the loudspeaker, rather than the reverberant field where sound is 'distant'. This combination of reverberation reduction and placing listeners in the direct sound field massively improves speech intelligibility. Clarity were able to demonstrate this onsite to great effect.

Small speakers were used to enhance coverage to specific areas not covered by the main beam, restoring high-frequency content to those areas in a very discreet manner.

Column loudspeakers of this type naturally fit into architecturally impressive environments such as this chapel. Their tall, thin nature is pleasing and allows for placement in narrow areas or next to other column-like structures. The discreet nature of these loudspeakers is improved further by colour matching them to the space and through careful installation methods.

In addition to some new Sennheiser EWD radio mics and new lectern gooseneck mics with Sennheiser ME34 capsules – already used in other areas of the school – the chapel required a complete new set of installed microphones to enable recording and streaming of various events that are held in the space. RODE NTG3 and DPA 6061 Omni Microdot microphones were installed at high level around the perimeter of the chapel to pick up on ambient sound and to be focussed on the choir, organ and congregation.

The central hub of this system is the MRX7D – Yamaha's digital signal processor which includes DANTE™ network control. Haileybury have standardised on the MRX7D for various areas of the school, all installed by Clarity, and have a segregated VLAN on the school network hosting DANTE traffic. This provides huge flexibility by opening access to any local audio system from virtually anywhere in the school, so that they can record a chapel choir service from an office 500 metres away.

The MRX7D processor is an open architecture device, meaning that signal flows can be built – virtually – by the system designer using drag and drop modules. It has a host of built-in tools such as parametric equaliser, four channel feedback reducer, system limiter, automatic microphone mixer and ambient noise compensation.

A further benefit of the system is that simple and intuitive wall controls can be used to quickly access the system. Ideal for day-to-day use without the need for a techy. An elegant Yamaha MCP1 control panel with an alpha-numeric display was used for this purpose.

For further information visit www.clarityslv.com