St Joseph’s College Chapel in Ipswich

St Joseph’s College Chapel in Ipswich was completed late 2019. This was a challenging installation for Old Barn Audio and the new Martin Audio sound system was just one part of the overall £750k chapel reburbishment.

The chapel itself belongs to the independent school, St. Joseph’s College, who approached OBA as the result of a recommendation. The majestic Ipswich chapel, forced to close for three years when it fell into disrepair has finally been brought back to life.

The project

OBA project manager Phil Clark’s first site visit revealed a pyramid shaped building, with no internal walls, and thus no fixing points, and a 60-metre high pitch. His solution was to install three clusters of three Martin Audio CDD8, pointing in each direction and carefully angled to suit the dispersion requirement. Two further CDD8 are positioned either side of the nave, while a slimline Martin Audio SX210 was of perfect dimension to be recessed under the stage, which bears the marble altar.

“The space is 50m across and 50m deep, with arches separating three sides of the pyramid,” explained Clark. “a standard wall or column mounting scenario was not available, so the only option was to mount the clusters on the underside of the arches to serve the venue.”

The OBA director first used EASE to model the room. “We designed the space into eight zones in order to time align the speakers with SMAART and to ensure each zone had linearity of sound.  We could then control them individually and run these clusters at a lower level to avoid as little echo as possible in the venue.”

The CDD solution serves a number of purposes. As St. Joseph’s is a musical college, a variety of musical ensembles will play through it — from string quartets to full classical set-ups. And as OBA has found with all it’s CDD installations it has once again delivered a transparent sound.

“As we all know about CDD it is a beautiful, smooth box, with a nice analogue ‘2-inch tape’ feel to it all wrapped up with a twist of modern technology and crispness! We specify it all the time because it just works.”

To complete the installation, OBA programmed 12” tablets to control the system via an internal network with access points, while ensuring all cabling has been carefully concealed.

Gallery

Next steps

Please get in touch if you want to enquire about an effective sound system for a church, hall or other venue, such as St Joseph’s College Chapel in Ipswich. Either on +44(0) 1892 752246, by email or our contact form and someone will get back to you.