Installation company Klartext has provided The Evangelische Kirche (Lutheran Protestant Church) in the Wahrenholz, north Germany, with a new audio system featuring Tannoy VX Series loudspeakers.
The ability to handle speech and a wide variety of musical styles, and to complement the aesthetics of the wood-dominated church room were among the priorities confronting the Klartext team.
Due to its wooden construction, the room has good natural acoustics, with a warm reverb that sounds neutral over the acoustic spectrum. As a result, the installation didn’t require beam-steering or line-array speakers to achieve a clear speech reproduction, but it still required something that would allow for an impressive music performance.
In February 2011, Klartext travelled to Wahrenholz to set up a testing system for a Sunday service, using Tannoy V 12s as the main speakers, supported by V 6 delay speakers and finished off with a VS 15 BP woofer placed near the altar. The test system was controlled by a TDX1 digital controller, the V 12 in stereo operation and the V 6 delay in mono set-up (the fourth output was used for the sub). Klartext used both AKG and Audio-Technica condenser microphones for different locations, to test their aptitude for the room, and they all worked well.
The specification performed extremely well during the test, and several months later an order was placed for a V system ‘as tested in February’. By that time Tannoy had launched its new VX Series, successor to the V Series range, but since the customer didn’t want to switch to different speaker types that had not been tested with the room, Klartext and Tannoy located two V 12 and two V6 for the lower nave, and recommended the use of the new VX 6 for the galleries.
Not wishing to affect the aesthetics of the church, Klartext painted the (originally black) V6 and VX 6 speakers to ensure they are fully complementary to the wooden columns on which they are mounted.
“We completed the installation within two days in late 2011, and since then, many sermons, music performances and gospel services have been held at The Evangelische Kirche, with the combination of both VX and V Series always performing perfectly to the customer’s fullest satisfaction,” said Volker Gringmuth of Klartext. “We fully expect more orders from that region, once the Tannoy’s show what an up-to-date system can sound like!”
