St. Ann Catholic Parish began in 1984 as a small mission, with its first Mass celebrated in the “Little White House” in Old Town Coppell. It now has an average weekly attendance of 10,000 people from a church dedicated in 2001, one of the largest Catholic churches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In December 2022, the parish asked the Diocese of Dallas to bring a tabernacle into the main church. That request grew into Transcend, a capital campaign to renew the sanctuary completely. Parish leadership had said from the outset that decorative paint and a new sound system would both act on a very sensitive acoustic, so audio was scoped and funded as its own phase of the campaign.
Conrad Schmitt Studios put around two dozen artists on the scaffolding from July 2025 to hand-paint an Assumption of Mary dome, a Raphael-inspired central mural, sacred artwork framing the sacraments, gold leaf and trompe l’oeil architectural detail. To complement the space’s visual enhancements, St. Ann Parish called upon Salas O’Brien to provide a new audio, video, lighting, electrical and acoustic design, which was integrated by Southlake, Texas-based Digital Resources.
For a quarter of a century the congregation had made do with basic ceiling speakers concealed in lighting fixtures, serviceable for the spoken word and little else. The parish music department, whose director is a published recording artist, programs both traditional hymns and newer praise and worship music in a contemporary style. Neither the room nor the old system could support the second half of that brief, which set the challenge that Salas O’Brien worked to. The new system had to carry bass and drums at full level in a highly reverberant room, hold the low-mid under control so the spoken word stayed intelligible, and stay visually subordinate to artwork that was still being painted.
“Music in Catholic churches tends to lean towards organ and choir music, but we include more contemporary music, and the old sound system simply couldn’t handle the low end that that kind of music requires,” says Cooper Michalski, St. Ann Catholic Parish’s A/V Specialist. “So we needed a new system that could handle that style of music. Ben at Salas O’Brien recommended L-Acoustics. It was a premium brand we were familiar with and it certainly lived up to its name for this installation.”
Syva Draws the Room Forward While X Series Carries the Coverage
Working in L-Acoustics Soundvision, Salas O’Brien split the system into the two jobs it had to do. “The Syva are purely for imaging, to make it sound like it’s coming from the primary focal point of the room,” explains Ben Boeshans, Salas O’Brien Associate Vice President, Technology & Acoustics. “We’re delivering coverage via the X8i, but using the columnar speakers to draw in the attention of the congregation to the liturgical action in the sanctuary. And I have to say I am impressed by how far the Syva punch into the room. It gets to about halfway back before you notice that you are hearing speakers from the side. And in a highly reverberant cathedral-style church like this, I’m going to take that as a win any day.”
Full coverage of the three arched seating wings came first, carried by X8i distributed down both sides of the nave and the transepts, with Syva flanking the altar to hold the congregation’s attention at the front of the space.
The design places left and right colinear Syva at the main altar, each paired with a Syva Low subwoofer. Twenty-two X8i line both sides of the nave and the left and right transepts, with two more flown over the balcony. Four ultra-compact coaxial X4i delays address the under-balcony area and four more cover the narthex. A pair of X4i also provide altar monitoring, and nine single-rack-space LA2Xi amplified controllers power and process the entire system.
Syva Low and Targeted Acoustic Treatment Deliver Bass Control in a Reverberant Nave
The loudspeakers sit in plain view, and color-matching keeps them visually quiet. The same discretion applied to the subwoofers, an uncommon sight in a Catholic sanctuary. “The Syva Low, which we added underneath the Syva columns, are perfect for this application,” Boeshans says. “We also were able to add acoustic treatment in specific areas to help tone down some of the low-mid and to improve bass control.”
Michalski points out that the colinear Syva were the right form factor for a parish intent on protecting the interior it had just finished restoring. “It not only gave us the kind of sound system we needed for contemporary music but also was the least intrusive, visually speaking, of any of the prospective products we looked at,” he explains. “Syva performs well and looks great doing so, which is an important criteria for a church like ours.”
A Sanctuary That Now Books Concerts
Contemporary worship music was the brief, and live concert programming is what the parish has gained. St. Ann now stages concerts in the main church, something the building could not previously support, and the music department can call on choirs and contemporary music teams in the same space without compromise.
“The church is hosting concerts now—they just had one earlier this week—and that’s not something they were really doing before, so that’s how far the room has been able to come,” says Boeshans.
For more information on St. Ann Catholic Parish, please visit www.stannparish.org. Salas O’Brien and Digital Resources can respectively be found online at www.salasobrien.com and www.digitalresources.com.
Please find L-Acoustics at www.l-acoustics.com.
