SANTA PAULA, CALIFORNIA: If its walls could talk, the Universalist Unitarian Church in Santa Paula, California, could undoubtedly tell some stories. Built in 1889, the church, now a Ventura County historical monument, was founded by former New Englanders who ended up building in the area north of Los Angeles during the great westward migration of the late 19th century.

But prior to this year, the voices of the past, being routed through the church's antiquated PA system, were unintelligible. However, a newly installed system, anchored by a high-performance Sennheiser microphone, let's the voices of today's congregation be heard clearly and succinctly.

Credit for the newfound voice intelligibility goes straight to the Sennheiser i40-C lectern mic package according to Stan Gonzales, president of TGK Audio Visual Solutions, the Ventura, California, systems integrator that installed a new sound system for the church. The Installed Sound (IS) microphones fall under the auspices of Sennheiser's channel manager for wired microphones, Anthony Buzzeo, who has recently devised more than thirty value-added mic packages to help contractors and installers easily pick the correct combination of mics for a particular application.

Gonzales choose the Sennheiser i40-C microphone due its high directivity, great sonic quality and tight pattern. The Sennheiser installation of the i40-C immediately improved voice intelligibility in a space that presented a myriad of acoustical challenges, none of which could be addressed by altering any of the church's architectural features. With an interior constructed of the type of wood commonly used in making fine string instruments, the space is highly reverberant. Additionally, since it was listed on the historic rolls, TGK didn't have the option of acoustically treating the interior of the building, nor the wooden lectern that housed the old microphone.

"The building is so old you're almost afraid to breathe," Gonzales says. "So we couldn't do a lot of cutting. We had to protect its landmark value at all costs." It was simply a matter of turning to audio technology to find the solution for an intelligibility problem that had become intolerable for the congregation.

"The old mic was so 'boom-boom' loud that people had to tiptoe around the mic when they were near it," he says. "You could hear pages being turned and there was little room for lectern-slamming passion. But the real issue was that no one in the audience could understand much of what was being said. I've worked with a lot of other mics," he says. "But the i40-C was the first mic that came to mind for this particular project. Our Sennheiser sales rep, Kelly Fair, had demonstrated the mic to us, and for several months we had been looking for the right situation to use it in. Now we had it."

The i40-C package contains an ME34 capsule, an MZH3040 gooseneck, and an MZS31 shock mount. "This mic has a very tight pattern and a lot of directivity," he says. "The cardioid capsule that we used was perfect for the application. You can slam your hand on the lectern and you don't hear a thing. It picks up what it's supposed to pick up. With just a little bit of EQ we were up and running with it. It sonically outperforms pretty much every boardroom-style mic on the market - almost a shotgun mic in a gooseneck."

Using the MZS31 shock mount, the mic was easily hardwired into the lectern - a relief given its fragility and the inability of TGK to do any reconstruction of the lectern to make it more acoustically friendly, Gonzales says.

The Sennheiser i40-C, he adds, is a shining example of the power that finely engineered audio equipment has to simplify the lives of systems integrators faced with tough challenges.

"To have a tool like this, where we can go into a project knowing it will do what it says, is half the battle," he says. "Some other mics may have done the job, but they probably wouldn't have performed as well as this one. That mic pretty much made us heroes in the eyes of the client."