New England's largest cathedral renews its sound system with Symetrix

The project carried out in the cathedral of Santa Cruz has included a new Led lighting and a complex sound system with Symetrix signal processors at its core.

the Cathedral of the Holy Cross has dominated Boston's Southeast neighborhood since its construction, after the Civil War. With a capacity of 1.700 seats and a ceiling that reaches 24 metre, is the largest Roman Catholic church in New England and the headquarters of the city's Archdiocese.

In the spring of 2017, The cathedral embarked on its first major renovation, including a new Led lighting and a complex sound system with signal processors Symetrix at its core. Two years later, The Cathedral has reopened its doors.

The new sound system offers various inputs and outputs, which are transported through a Dante network to facilitate movement signals around this large building. Two Symetrix Radius NX DSPs handle these signals, with one unit dedicated to input processing and the other handling delays to speakers located in the cathedral.

System Designer Evan Landry, President and Chief Technology Officer of Landry Audio, division of CommLink Integration, considered the versatility of the Radius NX important to meet the needs of the cathedral system.

“The Radius NX offers great flexibility in terms of processing, especially with the Super Matrix, which is processed on its own Sharc chip. We also have the ability to make logical inputs and outputs, which is very useful for turning things on and off in the processing rack and essential for muting the audio system in case of a fire alarm shutdown signal”, Landry says.

The system currently provides 32 input channels, and the Radius NX offers British equalizer and high-pass filter modules on each input channel.

Eight channels of wireless microphones are sent by two four-channel digital receivers Shure ULXD4Q. A further eight channels of wired microphones for the choir are routed to two Atnte Tech unDX4I Dante-enabled PoE-enabled wall plates, each has four mic/line inputs with preamplifiers and Phantom power.

A Dante network interface Attero Tech unD4I-L receives the signal from the gooseneck microphone residing in the pulpit.

The unD4I-L has four channels of microphone/line inputs and four channels of logical I/O. Logic is used to detect a pressure mat in the pulpit. Microphone gain increases by 5 dB on the Radius NX when the mat is stepped on and removed when the speaker is lowered from the mat. This boosts the signal for speakers with soft voices, while avoiding feedback when no one is in the pulpit.

Provisions were made for four altar microphone inputs, but they haven't been needed yet.. Similarly, an analog I/O expander, Symetrix xIO 4×4 enabled Dante is installed in the choir.

On the exit side, the system feeds an array of MicroBeam lines 64 bespoke, more 18 line arrays Innovox along the supporting columns through the cathedral: 16 in the area of the main nave and one in each of the transepts.

Amplification PowerSoft Drives all speakers. Each of these drives requires its own lag time to synchronize the entire system.

Accommodating all these lag times became the task of the second Radius NX., and the number of discrete outputs required was solved by installing analog output cards from 4 channels in the optional slots of both Radius NX processors, as well as adding a Symetrix xOut Expander 12 Analog outputs.

Two controllers are used for mixing and control: a tablet Microsoft Surface running a user interface screen programmed by Landry in SymView software, and a Symetrix T-5 touchscreen controller.

“Having a touch screen is really useful. It is programmable, So when someone changes their mind, as often happens with new projects, We can add a volume control, For example, with just one program change. We don't have to install other hardware.", Landry relates.

Landry can make changes or troubleshoot the system remotely by logging in through a Nook PC in the processing rack.

The cathedral's RF microphone system is configured as three separate zones and employs two RF place diversity fin antennas and two Shure UA864, that are sent to an RF zone antenna combiner 4.

A fully equipped broadcast studio in the basement generates content for television and webcasting and feeds the Catholic television network, based in Watertown, to 10 miles away.

One of the Radius NX processors feeds signals over the Dante network, via a Luminex switch, to the console Yamaha QL1 of the study. From there, The audio of the program is mixed and transmitted with video from the transmission facilities of the cathedral, to a fiber optic placed in the building's tower and a microwave transmitter that sends them to the John Hancock Building near the city's Copley Square..

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