An L-Acoustics immersive system carries visitors through 12,000 years of history at Timewalk, using L-ISA to place sound above, below, and around visitors as they stroll through the exhibit.
Visitors to Timewalk experience an hour walking through 12,000 years of human history, opening on the ritual gathering grounds of Göbeklitepe, moving through the hanging gardens of Babylon, the temples of ancient Egypt, and beyond, all displayed in a sequence, each a projection-mapped room of its own.
Timewalk runs 114 loudspeakers and 11 subwoofers across five zones, driven by 15 amplified controllers including LA7.16i, LA4X, and
LA2Xi, all running on Milan-AVB. The final mix is built in the L-ISA Processor, printed, and handed to the media servers which send the files over the network straight to the amplified controllers. The L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal system is designed to bring the audience into the experience while remaining invisible to audiences.
Asimetrik was brought on board to recess every enclosure into purpose-built wall housings at Immerse
LDN, what is claimed to be the UK’s largest dedicated immersive entertainment district in London, occupying more than 1,600 sq. m.
Bugra Kezan, project engineering manager, Asimetrik, commented: “The sound had to be an integral part of the experience, and it had to work wherever people were standing and whichever room they were walking through.”
The spatial image had to hold across the whole floor rather than
collapse toward a single position, with each room running a bank of projectors continuously. The cooling of these projectors lays down a broadband noise floor that never drops, meaning that the dynamic range had to be worked out around the sound. Each room runs independent programme material simultaneously, with no bleed permitted as one group walks into the chapter.
Timewalk’s projection surfaces sit close to the
walls, leaving nowhere to mount a cabinet in front of them. To circumvent this, every enclosure had to be recessed into a purpose-built housing set into the wall itself without encroaching on the fire escape corridors situated behind the walls, which fixed the available depth.
The building’s electrical infrastructure also had defined capacity, meaning that the audio had to fit inside it alongside a very large projection
load.
Kezan continues: “That is where L-Acoustics separated itself from the alternatives they evaluated. The cabinet dimensions relative to the SPL we needed let the recessed housings stay within the depth the escape corridors allowed. And the combination of loudspeaker sensitivity and amplifier efficiency delivered the same acoustic result at a materially lower power draw. It was a technical advantage, not a preference.”
Göbeklitepe, the first chapter,
runs a 9.1 layout of three X8i, six 5XT and two SB15m. Babylon, Ancient Egypt and the Maya areas each step up to a full L-ISA 360° configuration with a layer of loudspeakers set into the floor, so a sound can arrive from below a visitor as well as around them, delivered by five X8i, six X6i and 11 5XT paralleled across three separate lines, plus two
SB18i apiece.
Rapa Nui, the final chapter, is the most demanding of the five and the only room carrying both a below ear-level layer and an overhead one, letting L-ISA place a sound genuinely above or beneath a visitor rather than only around them. This space runs five X8i, two A10i Wide, 29 X6i and three KS21i. Three further 5XT cover the corridors between chapters.
Kezan closes:
“We specified this for the room, not for the content that happens to be in it. Immerse LDN rotates its experiences, and a new production can be authored against the loudspeaker layout and the object rendering that are already there, in most cases with nothing more than a recalibration and a new show file. The infrastructure is the permanent asset. The content sits on top of it.”