Milestone church gets 21st-century upgrade

In 1895 there were about 100 Catholics in the Colwyn Bay area and Mass was celebrated in a private house in the town. However, on Sunday Mass was celebrated in a large room in the Imperial Hotel.

The year 1898 was a milestone for the Colwyn Bay Mission. In January of that year, at the invitation of the bishop, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate – a priestly order – took charge of the mission. The order is still serving the parish today.

The town was growing and developing as a seaside resort, so the building of a church was felt to be a necessity. A benefactor, Monsignor James Lennon from Lancashire, donated the money to build a church in memory of his brother, Dean John Lennon.

The new church was to be dedicated to St Joseph. It was to be light, spacious and of sufficient size to accommodate the large number of Catholic visitors, as well as the local residents. The church was built between 1898 and 1900, and opened on Whit Sunday 1900.

In 2024, Richard King Systems came highly recommended to the church as accomplished specialists of sound reproduction in places of worship. An initial consultation meeting with the church’s representatives established the shortfalls and limitations of the existing system and was a starting point to formulate scheme suggestions to improve the delivery of the spoken word to the congregation.

The interior of the church presented many challenges to designing a system that would provide the best possible speech intelligibility. They included a highly reverberant environment and limited options for the placement of loudspeakers.

Following submission of the initial suggestions for the system design, loudspeakers, amplification and microphones were installed on a temporary basis for evaluation purposes. The reaction to the new, improved sound was universally positive – from both the church officials and the congregation – leading to Richard King Systems being instructed to provide a detailed scheme for the upgrade of the facilities.

While some items of the original equipment – hand-held radio microphones and amplification for ancillary areas – have been retained, the new system is in effect a complete upgrade replacement.

The heart of the system is a powerful control processer with a bespoke software design specifically built for St Joseph’s Church, with a user-friendly simple-to-use control that operates wirelessly. That control system enables adjustments to be made from any position quickly, discreetly and effectively.

In addition, the control processer provides behind-the-scenes automatic mixing of the microphone signals for optimum system operation. Fine tuning of the sound by the engineers from Richard King Systems provides for a reliable, first-class performance.

• For further information visit www.richardkingsystems.co.uk