Dating from the 1890s, St Ann’s church in the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl now boasts a thoroughly modern audio-visual system courtesy of Richard King Systems.
As well as improving speech intelligibility, a key requirement for the audio refresh was that the installed system would be easy to operate for non-technical people. For this reason, Richard King Systems chose to build the new solution around a Symetrix Jupiter 12 processor. “Often we see churches of this size being fitted with a traditional mixing desk but the plethora of buttons, knobs and faders can look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and very intimidating for the average person; with Jupiter we can hide all of that complexity”.
Three AKG gooseneck microphones and three MIPRO wireless microphones are fed into a processor which ensures a natural sounding mix when multiple microphones are in use.
Although microphone mixing has been automated, it is sometimes desirable to mute or adjust the level of a particular microphone. To make this foolproof, a custom interface was created that only presents level and mute controls to the operator and runs on an off-the-shelf Microsoft Surface tablet PC.
Processing for the speakers installed in the church is also handled by Jupiter; the comprehensive Speaker Manager on each output features eight bands of parametric EQ, high pass and low pass filters as well as 341ms of delay for accurate time alignment.
In addition to the church and hall sound and audio loop system upgrades new projectors have been installed.
