Bose RoomMatch a Fit for Washington Church
Jun 7, 2013 3:59 PM
When construction began on Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—a new Catholic church in Woodinville, Washington—church leadership and the architect, Seattle-based Broderick Architects, turned to Olympia’s CCI Solutions as consultant for acoustics and systems integrator for the audio system.
With the church’s design and layout as well as worship considerations presenting unique acoustic and sound system challenges, CCI Solutions President/CEO Ron Simonson selected a system consisting of RoomMatch array module loudspeakers from Bose Professional Systems Division.
“The church’s pastor, Father Schuster, took a very active role in the design of the facility, and he had specific preferences for the acoustics and audio, as he should,” says Simonson. “It was an absolute requirement that the acoustics of the room would need to strongly support congregational worship and their pipe organ. We had to strike a balance in the acoustical program between speech clarity and a reverb time sufficiently long to support the music program. Go too far in the first direction, and things will sound dead, but too much reverb on the other hand will make spoken word and music hard to understand.
“Also, Father Schuster demanded that the speakers be hidden out of sight,” Simonson continues. “Another challenge was that the architectural design of the church is a ‘cruciform’, with transepts on either side—a challenging acoustical layout. With those challenges to solve, we explored a number of speaker design options. The Bose RoomMatch design we created met all of the criteria and ended up as the most cost-effective solution.”
Simonson and his team worked closely with Broderick Architects in defining the acoustic program for the church. After strategically working absorptive and diffusive surfaces into the design, the final system consists of two RoomMatch 7040, one RM9010 and one RM5520 array module, powered by the PowerMatch PM8500 configurable professional power amplifier.
“When the system was up and running, everyone was just amazed at how natural the speech sounded, and how great the music filled the room,” Simonson says. “And in the end, not only did the Bose system sound great, it was more cost-effective than the other options, which made the client very happy.”
PRODUCT AT WORK: Bose RoomMatch
Designed primarily to extend the low-frequency response of Bose RoomMatch array modules to 40Hz, the RoomMatch subwoofer module features dual Bose 15in. high-excursion woofers, with a proprietary port design that minimizes distortion and improves perceived transient impact. The durable Baltic birch enclosure with two-part polyurethane coating allows reliable ground-stack applications.
