Zimmer vs Williams Goes Spatial with TiMax at the Royal Albert Hall

	"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 back to the musician on stage," says Higgott.

Music of Zimmer vs Williams at London's Royal Albert Hall pits the biggest Hans Zimmer and John Williams scores from five decades of cinema history against one another on the concert stage. The event features 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.

This year, front-of-house engineer Phil Wright added a spatial twist with the help of a 64-channel TiMax SoundHub. The product segued simply into the audio setup, driving each component of the hall's PA individually. Object-based mixing made it possible to expand the score into the available space while also building a spatialization tuned for every seat in the house.

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. On the day, the matrix dropped straight into the sound system in place of the existing delay times. 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 nearly 8' from the front of the stage to the back, rising 15.7" 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 spatialization, holding the imaging together as the staging rose.

"The imaging held together as you went up the building, not just across it," says Dan Higgott, TiMax product and software manager. "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 back to the musician on stage."

Wright says, "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 localization of sources, made for an absolutely magical experience out front. It works exactly the same way as object-based mixing in the studio. 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, he says: "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-degree configuration of the Royal Albert Hall, coupled with TiMax's ability to combine height into its spatialization, 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. "Normally, if I'm doing a good job, nobody says anything all day," Wrights says. "But I've never had a conductor come to me between shows to say his guests found it absolutely astounding."