Featured Projects
St. Bernard RC Church, Bradford PA
Installation Completion: January 2025
When I first walked into St. Bernard of Clairvaux church in Bradford PA I was taken with its size, beauty, and history. But as an audio professional I was also taken aback at the acoustics. Reverb decay measured in seconds, not milliseconds. Reflections and delays. If you are in the church and speaking to someone, intelligibility starts to disappear after you are more than fifteen feet away from them. That was 25 years ago in 1999. At the time I was working for another company, and we installed a delay line loudspeaker system. It worked reasonably well and served the church for the last quarter century.
Fast forward to June 2024. JB Pro Sound was contacted by the current priest at St. Bernard, Father John Jacquel. We worked with Fr. John in 2006 at Our Lady of the Lake in Edinboro, PA. It was a new construction project, and JB Pro Sound was a fairly new company. We had to get it right and we did. In fact, one of the testimonials on this site is from Fr. John about that system. He remembered, and that is why he contacted us about the huge renovation taking place at St. Bernard.
Often, doing a renovation is significantly more difficult than new construction. And in a 133-year-old building it becomes much more challenging. We needed to take apart the old system, determine what, if any, infrastructure and components could be reused and then design and build a new system. In the end, we wound of using a handful of existing wiring and two equipment racks. The new system is a state of the art, compact, column line array loudspeaker design, with a rear delay line array. There are multiple wired inputs, two choir areas and multiple wireless microphones. A five-stage power sequencing system, digital signal processing, media player and dedicated livestream feed are some of the highlights. Most importantly, the coverage and speech intelligibility of the system is perfect. And equally important, once again, Fr. John is completely satisfied with JB Pro Sound and the results. We may have to hit him up for another testimonial.
We would not be replete if we did not give a tip of the hat to the people from the church and the other trades that we worked with to complete this project. Thank you. As well as our photos of this renovation, you can see more of the beauty of the church at https://stbernardcatholic.org
Jack Bernard (no relation to the saint)
Owner, JB Pro Sound
