2008 VIC NECA Awards

Rutledge Engineering have secured the Victorian Commercial Small Project 2008 NECA Award

Rutledge Engineering are proud to annouce their success in winning the Victorian NECA (National Electrical & Communications Association) award for St Paul's Cathedral Commerial - Small Project

Victoria

Commercial – Small Project

 

To download the recent article on St Paul's Cathedral which featured in Issue 1 of AV Magazine please click here

 

St Paul’s Cathedral

St Paul's Cathedral is an historic landmark located in the heart of Melbourne. It is a traditional Anglican church in Gothic Revival architectural style. Opposite Flinders Street Railway Station, the Cathedral provides a place of worship or contemplation for locals and travellers from across Australia and overseas.

The sheer size and beautiful architecture of the Cathedral’s interior, combined with the long acoustic reverberation time presents significant architectural and acoustic challenges for a Cathedral sound system to clearly disseminate the spoken word.

While a normal Service may attract several hundred worshippers, a special service at Christmas or Easter or a state funeral often gathers a congregation of nearly 2000 people.

To overcome the difficulties with speech clarity, St Paul’s set out in 2007 to source a new, advanced Speech Reinforcement System that was to deliver high quality, high clarity amplified speech to all listeners in Cathedral services and functions.

Acoustic Directions undertook a considerable amount of acoustic calculations and modeling to prepare the design of a sound system that would meet the Cathedral’s requirements. Acoustic Direction’s design was sophisticated; it employed a time-sequenced series of loudspeakers mounted on the structural columns, with each loudspeaker being a beamsteered line-array type. Although the beam-steered array loudspeaker are mounted vertically, they direct sound in a downward direction, preventing if from reaching the high ceiling where it would increase sound reverberation, and hence degrade clarity. The challenge for the loudspeaker design was to provide identical steering to all frequencies in speech.

Rutledge Engineering was appointed to implement the system. The scope was to supply, install and integrate the speech reinforcement solution along with a custom designed interface, allowing users to access and control the system.

Installation of the speaker and microphone cabling was undertaken by RelyOn Pty Ltd, a Melbourne based electrical company. Their task was made difficult by the need to sensitively install and integrate the 16 core multli-core speaker cables into the heritage fabric of the Cathedral’s interior.

The system’s capabilities extend beyond merely ‘reinforcing speech’. A mix of strategically located patch points throughout the Cathedral allows the interconnection of various microphones and audio sources, as well as a nominated Front-of-house mixing position/s with multiple breakout facilities for the Nave Altar area. The multiplicity of loudspeaker locations and precise DSP (Digital Signal Processing) allows clergy to roam in nominated areas while maintaining uniform sound coverage and clarity throughout the Cathedral.

Wireless control system touch panels allow the user the freedom to control all the functional parameters of the system from any location within the Cathedral and adjoining administrative rooms. For example, subtle adjustments to microphone levels can be discretely made to compensate for varying speech volumes that are regularly encountered during services.

Rutledge Engineering has delivered a sophisticated high level speech reinforcement system, designed by Acoustic Directions, which has exceeded all expectations. Rutledge demonstrated its ability to meet the client’s needs by successfully coordinating the works around the Cathedral’s service obligations, with a two- stage delivery. Ultimately, the heritage fabric remained intact through the collaborative efforts of design, selection of equipment, installation and integration. The St Paul’s Cathedral project is certainly a success for St Paul’s Cathedral, Acoustic Directions, Rutledge Engineering and RelyOn.

 

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