Resplendent before beautiful views of Lake Lugano and the Alpine foothills, the cathedral of San Lorenzo rises above the town centre of the Swiss town of Lugano. A comprehensive restoration programme begun in included the recent installation of a new audio system based around digitally steerable VSA column speakers by RCF.
The other main system component is made up of four VSA column speakers. These provide the same characteristics as the VSA but incorporate 12 speakers. This speaker can be subtly and unobtrusively integrated into any environment. All speakers are controlled individually and can be activated or deactivated as needed. The RCF Engineering Support Group aided the customer in realising this system, taking into account the architectural conditions and adapting to both the building restrictions as well as the electro-acoustic limitations.
The installation planners decided on digitally steerable speakers to provide the best possible speech intelligibility in an environment with natural reverb tails in the speech frequency range of up to 4 seconds. These cover the main nave area the operating range for each speaker being up to 15 meters , providing crystal-clear speech intelligibility and a good signal-to-noise ratio across a wide frequency range.
This lets us focus the sound on the desired area and avoid unwanted reflections, guaranteeing the best possible speech intelligibility, even in environments with long natural reverb tails like this one.
The ESG team has also adapted the app to better meet customer requirements. The installation process also integrated all stand-mounted arrays. The team also handled the initial set-up and subsequent fine-tuning of the system using careful acoustic measurements and analysis.
