St. Leonard Catholic Church Steps Up To TWAUDiO

Since 1957, St. Leonard Catholic Church has served the city of Muskego, about 20 miles southwest of downtown Milwaukee. The parish added a school in 1960 and continued to grow, becoming a vibrant community of more than 1,600 families. Dedicated in 1980, the current church building features a 65-foot-wide by 100-foot-deep sanctuary that until recently hosted entirely traditional services. Its outdated sound system consisted of a single center loudspeaker and a very old analog mixer, with no outboard processing.

Recently, St. Leonard moved toward a more contemporary-style service, including a live band with guitars, drum kit, and piano, while retaining its choir and traditional preaching. Realizing that the old sound system was entirely inadequate to their needs, the parish selected AV and lighting systems integrators Sven Pro to design and install a new sound system.

Sven Pro senior system design engineer Zachary Lisko specified a monaural system based on four TWAUDiO T20i compact installation loudspeakers, powered by Lab.gruppen D40:4L amplifiers.

As is typical of Catholic churches, St. Leonard is very reverberant, with little to no treatment,” observes Lisko.

“To handle more contemporary services, the church’s new system had to provide solid pattern control and clear intelligibility for speech but also be capable of reinforcing live bands. It was important that the loudspeakers be unobtrusive so they wouldn’t change the overall look of the sanctuary. TWAUDiO T20i loudspeakers easily met all of these criteria.”

Complicating matters, the building was undergoing an expansion during the install. “Due to scheduling conflicts, the speakers needed to be available on short notice,” Lisko recalls. “Fortunately, TWAUDiO was able to ship the PA system from Germany to Wisconsin amazingly quickly, despite the short notice, enabling us to complete the install within the church’s tight time frame.”

TWAUDiO’s T20i loudspeaker design delivers coherent phase response and constant directivity horizontally as well as vertically. Lisko took advantage of these features to design a four-loudspeaker system that covered the entire congregation while minimizing reflections off the sanctuary’s many hard surfaces.

St. Leonard has no official tech staff, so the new sound system had to be very simple to learn and use. “The client needed a system that is very simple to operate and that can be pre-programmed with scenes to allow easy access to the full capabilities of the system,” Lisko says. “The TWAUDiO T20i meets this need, as well, with dedicated presets for use with the Lab.gruppen D series amplifiers we installed at St. Leonard.”

“At Sven Pro, we always strive to give the best quality for a fair and competitive price,” states Lisko. “TWAUDiO has proven time and time again that they deliver consistently high quality and performance that lives up to our expectations, while coming in at a price that can easily be justified to clients. St. Leonard’s new sound system fit their budget, doesn’t affect the sanctuary’s aesthetics, and sounds great in an untreated and reverberant space. The parish is very pleased.”