St. Gabriel the Sorrowful Mother church updates with Quattrocanali

A voice from above

St. Gabriel ChurchThe church’s original system from 2002 favored a top-down approach, with a cluster of three speakers mounted overhead to deliver audio to the parishioners below. Although this achieved the intended effect, over time it became apparent that the setup struggled in a few key areas. “What makes these kinds of spaces difficult is the layout,” explained Monte Brothers Project Director Steve Minozzi. “The location of the pulpit strays into the center of the church which makes it hard to design a system that can be mounted up above without having sounds reflections that interact with the microphones.”

Aside from creating feedback at the high volumes required, the positioning of the ceiling-mounted speakers also resulted in dead spots where attendees had trouble hearing the mass due to their interactions with how space had been acoustically treated when it was originally built. “There are vents and cushioning on the seats that were designed to try and help to account for reflections,” Minozzi said. “But no matter how much treatment you use, the position of the speakers was going to interact with them, and in the meanwhile, it was also creating spots that made audibility difficult.”

Realizing that a different approach needed to be taken, Minozzi and his crew removed the ceiling speakers in favor of ones lining the side columns, using a pair CAMM CA-43Ls as the mainline arrays and seven CAMM DT-200s as the fill speakers. They also made use of some of the church’s existing speakers as well as to ensure that work was done efficiently and cost-effectively. “The position of the mainline arrays give us enough throw to have a focused sound all the way to the center of the Church,” Minozzi said. “We use the DT-200s to fill out the rest of the sound for the seats not immediately in its path, ensuring that the sound is evenly distributed and audible without interacting with the pulpit whatsoever.” Sound professionals at the church are able to control the entire system with a simple control panel located behind the altar.

‘Powersoft was the amp for us’

At the heart of the system is the Powersoft Quattrocanali 1204, one of several Powersoft amplifiers that Monte Brothers uses regularly in their worship space installs. Minozzi and his team selected them due to their high-power capacity and ability to handle multiple speaker types smoothly. “This church required very powerful amps because it’s an acoustically tight space,” he explained. “The 1204’s have SIGNIFICANT power and run very smoothly with all of the different speakers in this setup, so they were exactly what was needed to get the job done.”

Minozzi went on to explain that he favors using Powersoft products because of their reliability, saying that once he uses them in an install he knows that they’re going to work. “Most of our installs use Powersoft amplifiers because they have a very low failure rate and we rarely have to replace them,” he said. “The fact that they are so dependable is why we know that Powersoft was the amp for us.”

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