TiMax total immersion wows students
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Cambridge-based immersive audio pioneers, Out Board, provided the school with a TiMax spatial delay-matrix, complete with TiMax Tracker, for students to experience the creation of a sound design pushed beyond the usual boundaries of intelligibility, balance and audience immersion.
After the student production, course tutor Sam Digny and guest mentor sound designer Justin Teasdale held a seminar insight day showcasing their experience and success with the advanced immersive TiMax technology. A wider audience of invited industry professionals comprised local hire companies, production managers, sound engineers and students old and new.
Out Board’s Robin Whittaker hosted a morning session presenting TiMax alongside a discussion of the wider principles of sound. He posited, “Where do you go beyond the fidelity readily achieved by modern loudspeaker systems? Beyond fidelity, localisation is the obvious thing and a major part of this whole current immersion discussion, in a stage environment like this, is multiple localisations made effective for an entire audience.”
In the afternoon Teasdale presented the dynamism of the 9 to 5 soundscape, which included vocal localisation of the main cast and panoramic spatialisation of the band, who were positioned off-stage. The classic LCR-hung Optima 5 line array system in the GSA’s Bellaris theatre was augmented with a centre left and a centre right hang for 9 to 5. Loaned directly from Inspired Audio, these helped add extra resolution in the TiMax object-based spatial image definition rendering. The GSA’s existing front-fill and surrounds were supported with two extra Inspired Audio MQ12 full range enclosures to boost front-fill.
Teasdale comments, “Sound is very difficult to explain, it’s not tangible. But that moment, flipping to the TiMax soundscape, was so powerful! The [audience in the seminar] room could hear the sound really open up, making it feel more real, like the musicians were in the space - and for voices the action was so much easier to follow.”
(Jim Evans)
