RCF column solution for greek orthodox church

When the Greek Orthodox Church of Evangelism of Holy Mary in Pili Dervenohorion was seeking a sound system that would give them greater intelligibility in a highly reverberant environment, installers Kariotis Bros Co turned to an RCF solution.
As the Italian manufacturer’s distributor in Greece, Kariotis knew that a combination of eight L2406T compact three-way column arrays would deliver the spoken word with crystal clarity while the slim column profile would not intrude on the church’s murals and frescos. At the same time they chose eight elements of RCF MQ-100L columns for use in the church’s secondary annex.
Kariotis had already made a sound study of the church two years previously … but unhappy with the solution provided by the competitive bidder on that occasion the church called Kariotis back in and asked them to design a superior reference sound system.
Since Orthodox churches reproduce only the spoken word and choral music, rather than recorded sounds or musical instruments Kariotis turned to high quality supercardioid mics for the cantors and highly sensitive mic caps for the priest — reinforced with high standards of power amplifiers, dynamic vocal processors, feedback eliminators, sound mixer and of course RCF L2406T columns for the main temple and RCF MQ 100L for the secondary room. A further point in favour of the RCF solution was that the priest was already familiar with the brand.
“Royal cathedral churches in Greece historically have a huge problem with echo reproduction and so the most important issue was to get the clearest sound reproduction of the voices in all spaces, as well as zero feedback from the speakers,” said Pandelis Kariotis, the installation company's general manager. “Automatic correction of any bad sound effect was the criteria of our installation.”
He said that the RCF L Series had ticked all the boxes. “It not only suited the architecture but the L2406T is a very efficiency column array speaker. The vertical dispersion can manage coverage over huge heights such as this; also the reproduction of vocals is very dynamic and clear.”
Equally successful was the installation of the eight MQ 100L 3-way column elements — again meeting the critical acoustical criteria and managing the architectural constraints, with its wide horizontal coverage angle of 180° and vertical dispersion of 60° filling the wide space.
Pandelis Kariotis himself designed the RCF solution, based on careful analysis, while sales manager and technical supervisor, Giannis Stathis took responsibility for the filtering systems and selection of the preamps, mics and mixer.
In conclusion, Mr. Kariotis said, “In the two or three days after replacing the old sound system the church was constantly full of worshippers. So I guess that says something.”