SOUND SYSTEM IN THE CATHEDRAL OF CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO

Date: November 23, 2022

All churches, cathedrals or shrines, are architecturally and acoustically different from each other, but because of their conformation and the materials used to build them, the most common problem is that of reverberation. It was precisely for this reason that the pastor of the Cathedral of Caguas in Puerto Rico, contacted the Vosmo Company, representative of Belltron audio products in the United States based in Miami.

According to the first written documents, the Catedral Dulce Nombre de Jesus was founded as a hermitage in 1729, but only in 1930 took on the current architectural features and acquired the category of Cathedral in 1965. The new church is much more spacious than the previous ones: it has two towers, a bell tower on the north tower and three double doors to the main entrance. On the sides it has two large glass rosettes with twelve other small circles around. To give an idea of the width, inside it has three altars, and in the single nave there are four rows of benches with about 50 benches per row.

In order to achieve an optimum result, a preliminary study is necessary to assess the particularities of the case. For this reason, the Belltron dealer Giorgio Moscatelli visited the site to find out what were the problems of the church and therefore what were the most suitable devices to solve them. There was an obvious problem of echo due to the characteristics of the cathedral itself.

Six Belltron speakers of the CA-65 series with 24 speakers and two 12 speakers were installed, characterized by a homogeneous angular dispersion and excellent intelligibility of the voice, low visual impact and high performance in reverberant environments.

As a result of the placement of the speakers and the equalization of the BPA-08 amplifier, the echo problem in the church was minimized and the intelligibility of the voice increased considerably. The signal processing of the chosen amplifier is exclusively in digital form. The audio amplification inside the place can be adjusted in detail and customized according to the sound absorption and depending on the tone of the speaker, thanks to a parametric equalizer and an adjustable delay line.

The parish priest was very pleased with the new system and the parishioners made positive comments about it.