Bern Cathedral, Bern

With the renovation of the electroacoustic sound system of the Bern Cathedral, a challenging project was competently realised.

The Reformed Bern Minster is the largest and most important late medieval church in Switzerland, for which the foundation stone was laid in 1421. From 1575 to 1588 (with some interruptions), the sandstone tower was built to a height of 55 metres. It was not until 300 years later that the cathedral was raised to 100.6 m and thus completed. In 1983, it was included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Before the renovation of the electroacoustic sound system was put out to tender as a neutral tender, EMPA (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research) measured and analysed the room acoustics. Due to the reverberation time of six seconds (STI > 0.6) and the protection of historical monuments, the project was quite challenging. The contract for the complete replacement of the 80-year-old audio system was awarded to Kilchenmann thanks to the well thought-out overall concept.

Because of the exceptionally good speech intelligibility and the appealing appearance, 33 passive PanBeam (PB8-15) loudspeakers were used in the nave of the church. The five-kilogram sound columns with 15 x 2.1-inch long-throw chassis can be mounted easily and yet in a versatile way. Complete coverage of the audience area is ensured by the very wide dispersion angle of 140°.

The Symetrix DSPs and PanBeam speakers work in perfect harmony, even without a subwoofer. Loudspeakers, induction loop, recording as well as input signals are levelled, mixed and routed by the DSPs, which managed equalisation, time alignment and output management. The handling of the system was made as simple as possible. Based on the good experience, our team used Symetrix products and programmed SymVue interfaces for the touch panels.