The recent Music of Zimmer vs Williams show at the Royal Albert Hall brought a spatial twist to the sound through use of a 64-channel TiMax SoundHub – bringing the ‘beyond stereo’ thinking FOH engineer Phil Wright had seen succeed at festivals and other events.
Used solely for this concert, TiMax SoundHub slotted easily into the audio set-up, driving each component of the hall’s PA individually. With object based mixing it was then possible to expand the score into the available space whilst also building a spatialisation tuned for every seat in the house.
The show pits the biggest Hans Zimmer and John Williams scores from five decades of cinema history against one another on the concert stage. Zimmer’s bold, immersive soundscapes are set against Williams’ timeless melodies. The Royal Albert Hall gives the music the space to be truly cinematic, with an augmented London Concert Orchestra of seven French horns, six trumpets, five trombones, two tubas and a massive five-man percussion section filling the room.
Led by Project Manager Laurence Jarrett, with Wright at the console, the in-house team has delivered large-scale orchestral shows in the venue since the department was established in 2015.
Accurate speaker positions and angles were imported into SoundHub ahead of the event, and precise level and delay times were calculated from each of the hall’s loudspeakers to each source on stage. On the day, the matrix dropped straight into the sound system in place of the existing delay times and sounded almost perfect from the off, with a brief soundcheck refining the last few per cent before the orchestra began at 11am. The inputs were grouped to mirror the orchestra’s layout, with the string and woodwind families split into objects matching their positions on stage and everything else running one-for-one, for a system of 64 inputs and 40 outputs.
The hall’s staging climbs 2.4m from the front of the stage to the back, rising 40cm per riser, so instruments on the risers sit further from the PA than those on the flat – a noticeable height difference that is traditionally not accounted for in the sound system. But because SoundHub works with height as well as level and delay, that extra dimension was carried into the spatialisation, holding the imaging together as the staging rose.
‘The imaging held together as you went up the building, not just across it,’ says TiMax Product and Software Manager Dan Higgott. ‘The perception of listening to a sound system disappears. You focus entirely on the performance, with no impression of amplified sound, because SoundHub’s delay panning aligns every source wavefront to the musician on stage.’
Wright was unequivocal about the outcome: ‘I can honestly say that was the best sounding show I’ve ever mixed in that room. The level of clarity and detail in every orchestral instrument, coupled with the accurate localisation of sources, made for an absolutely magical experience out front.
‘It works exactly the same way as object-based mixing in the studio,’ he continues. ‘I find myself needing less EQ, much less dynamics processing, and I have much higher headroom and gain before feedback than traditional bus-based mixing.’
The venue’s in-the-round layout made the point sharper still. ‘In a proscenium-arch situation you could delay groups or input channels on the console to be correct for an audience in one dimension. But the unique 360° configuration of the Royal Albert Hall, coupled with TiMax’s ability to combine height into its spatialisation, meant that every tier of that stage was in time with the PA for everyone in the auditorium. The result was simply stunning.’
Jarrett was impressed with the sound, and the verdict was echoed from an unusually well-placed quarter when the show’s conductor sought Wright out between performances. ‘Normally, if I’m doing a good job, nobody says anything all day,’ he says. ‘But I’ve never had a conductor come to me between shows to say his guests found it absolutely astounding.’
More: https://timaxspatial.com