Glyndebourne, the famous UK opera house, has integrated TiMax SoundHub spatial processing into its audio infrastructure in a landmark upgrade.
The venue is amongst the world’s most acoustically sensitive performance environments and here, opera is preserved as fundamentally an acoustic art form. Without compromise to this tenet, head of sound and video Jonathan Moss led the
installation which marked the first stage of a long-term move to harness object-based spatialisation.
TiMax was central to the venue’s audio redesign. Moss’s dialogue with Robin Whittaker of TiMax was undertaken across a period of four
years and well ahead of any further reinforcement considerations. “With a number of upgrades coinciding, we had the rather unique opportunity to look at things holistically,” Moss explained. “We were able to assess where we wanted to
end up. TiMax is one of the first steps, not the end of the journey.”
A traditional proscenium system comprises EM Acoustics’s sympathetic Reference Series – R12s with R8 infills and S215 subs at balcony level, supported
by a network of permanently installed Reference Series loudspeakers throughout the auditorium. With Dante providing the audio backbone for EM Acoustics DQ20s, driven via an SSL Live console, the seamlessly straightforward TiMax integration amounted to little
more than a rack mount connected the network by two cables.
During a busy summer season, dedicated sound sessions are rare, and the manual delay previously needed for spatial work was operationally costly. With a timetable comprised
of morning fully supported technical rehearsal, an afternoon changeover for a public evening show, then an overnight reset for the next day, Moss confirms, “We can achieve what we need within the sessions we’ve got, rather than
being limited by the time it takes to do things manually.”
The audio infrastructure is carefully future-proofed. Integration with the SSL Live console adds flexibility via OSC and control panels allow any channel to be designated
as a spatial object on demand. Full object-based spatialisation is built into the workflow, with spatial presets, tracked movement paths and surround distribution, simply awaiting the expanded infrastructure planned for the auditorium over coming years.
image: Sam Stephenson