LONDON – For close to 10 years, TiMax has played a role in the operas that Raymond Gubbay has staged at Royal Albert Hall. TiMax was used once again for Gubbay's recent in-the-round production of Carmen at the O2 Arena – but on a much larger scale.
Sound design for the O2 event was, as usual, the responsibility of Bobby Aitken, who consulted with Robin Whittaker of TiMax developers Out Board on how to appropriately scale up their Albert Hall distributed source-oriented reinforcement concept.
Chris Ekers handled system engineering and management, with Autograph's Jim Douglas looking after supply and installation. Paul Stannering was the FOH engineer.
In its first use for an arena-sized production, TiMax Tracker was deployed for performer tracking, with six TT Sensors mounted on balcony rails above the corporate boxes.
The raised s-shaped stage platform and lower forestage aprons were divided into 36 tracking zones, which Tracker used to control continuously varying matrixed delay times in a 48-channel TiMax SoundHub processor.
Twelve leads and chorus members wore miniature TT Tags which transmitted radar-frequency UWB pulses, allowing the Sensors to track them in three dimensions down to an accuracy of 15cm over a 100-meter distance, using a hybrid of AOA (Angle of Arrival) and TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) analysis.
Thirty low-profile Meyer UPJ arrays were mounted in adjacent pairs on 1m high stands around the stage edge. These were arranged as crossfiring pairs to cover all lower tier audience seats from opposite aspects so that the TiMax precedence delays could do their localizing magic up, down and across the stage.
Upper tiers were covered by no fewer than 12 independent, radially-arrayed Meyer line-array hangs, which were also being continuously dynamically focused by TiMax to the onstage localization zones.
A separate stereo music system hung above the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, performing about two-thirds of the way upstage, helped keep musical timings intact.
Despite the scale of the production, the TT Tags and Sensors proved up to the task, providing consistent localization even with to distances of 80 to 100 meters, eliciting comments such as "Clever how you make the sound move…" from astute listeners in the audience.
For more information, please visit www.outboard.co.uk.
