First Presbyterian Church, Houston, Texas
First Presbyterian Church of Houston, Texas, resides on a campus of a dozen buildings in the city’s pedestrian-heavy Museum District. Yet the acoustics in the church’s main sanctuary rendered the spoken word unintelligible for members and visitors. So church leadership reached out to local firm Worley Acoustics. To solve this issue, owner Wade Worley specified Renkus-Heinz Iconyx digitally steerable speaker arrays, installed by area integrator Hi-Fi Doc LLC.
Worley describes the acoustics in the main sanctuary in classic terms: “Here we have a shoebox room, widely acclaimed as a great organ room. They have a very nice pipe organ. And a lot of Houston-based organists love to come and play in this room because it’s got such a long reverberation time, especially in the low frequencies.”
A balance between technology and aesthetics
While intelligibility required improvement, it couldn’t be at the cost of destroying the church’s aesthetics. “In wonderful traditional rooms like this with long reverberation times, you really don’t want to ruin the acoustics for traditional worship,” Worley explains. “You need a product like the Renkus-Heinz Iconyx that’s going to give you a very tight beam of sound down to the listeners and keep the sound off the walls and ceiling.”
“In wonderful traditional rooms like this with long reverberation times, you really don’t want to ruin the acoustics for traditional worship." Wade Worley, Worley Acoustics, Houston, TX
After an on-site demonstration, Worley selected a pair of low-profile Renkus-Heinz IC32/16-R-II digitally steerable line array loudspeaker systems as the main front speakers. His company also installed several Renkus-Heinz TRX81-DF two-way Complex Conic downfill speakers in the balcony. “The Renkus-Heinz product has been well accepted after being seen and heard in the room,” he notes.
Learn more at: www.fpchouston.org, www.hifidoc.com, www.renkus-heinz.com
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