St Bene’t’s Church

Take the oldest Saxon building in arguably the UK’s most famous medieval city, and the task of equipping it sensitively with a 21st century sound reinforcement system may sound like the contract from hell. Add to the fact that the current vicar happens to be Revd Angela Tilby, well known for her regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’.

During a long consultation period, services were attended to gain valuable insight into how the building was used and a number of demonstrations were given to the various stakeholders, including English Heritage, to arrive at a system that delivered maximum speech intelligibility with minimum impact upon the architecture.

The system features the brand new JBL CBT (Constant Beamwidth Technology) column speakers, which owing to their great performance, ended up only being required in 4 of the original 8 planned locations. With a pulpit position ahead of the desirable speaker positions, a BSS Soundweb DSP gives the ability to select different presets for different speaking positions that subtly alter delays, EQ and levels to give the sense that sound is coming from where the person is standing.

Installation of the new Sennheiser G3 300 series wireless microphones offered a number of useful features such as cuff worn mute switches so as the clergy can speak discretely off mic without having to reach deep into a pocket to mute a bodypack. Charging batteries has become a thing of the past with recharging caddies into which the bodypacks dock so as to be always fully charged ready for the next usage.

Angela wears a DPA 4066 headset, which offers fantastic quality as well as brilliant gain before feedback performance and a total absence of rustle from garments, plus she looks every bit the multimedia star she is.

Finally, the pulpit microphone position became a woodwork project whereby a plinth was fabricated in matching timber into which the AKG 747 gooseneck microphone was fitted with additional rubber shock mounting to avoid having to drill into the pulpit and so as it could be removed between services as the building prides itself in being open to the public constantly.

The relationship continues as plans are afoot to webcast sermons in the future and to set up an ISDN broadcast studio at Angela’s home from which she will be able to link to Broadcasting House.