Design of the new public address (PA) system for the cathedral of Munster, Germany

One of the most renowned cathedrals in Germany, the Dom St. Paul in Münster was completely closed for renovation for almost one year. During this time the entire electro acoustical sound reinforcement system has been renewed. As for most buildings of this type the acoustical situation is far away from optimal. This mainly is due to a huge reverberation time which makes the understanding of spoken words almost impossible. Moreover, the old concept of sound reinforcement by using distributed loudspeaker systems all over the church is not satisfying anymore with respect to nowadays demands for quality and speech intelligibility. Due to the situation that the number of people in the cathedral during service times is varying from only some hundreds to over 2500 a more flexible PA system is required, that takes into account that only occupied areas inside of the cathedral should be supplied with amplified sound. To achieve the target an entirely new concept for the sound reinforcement based on digital signal distribution and modern digitally operated array loudspeakers was developed. The requirement for the speech intelligibility was to reach at least an STI of more than 0.5. The system will be discussed and results will be shown.