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London's Royal Albert Hall recently hosted an opera-in-the-round production of La Bohème, which made use of Out Board's TiMax audio imaging delay matrix and a new automated tracking system developed by Norwegian technologists Track the Actors (TTA). Autograph Sound provided the Meyer, XTA and DiGiCo D5T sound system, supervised by Andy Brown.
Sound designer Bobby Aitken uses TiMax to create a “source-oriented reinforcement” system employing Haas precedence delay psychoacoustics to ensure all audience members perceive the vocals to be coming from the opera singers and not from the multichannel sound system distributed on a grid above the stage and behind grilles in the stage. Aitken and sound engineer Richard Sharat's goal was to ensure that every audience member received an acoustic wavefront from each performer about 10 to 20 ms before the reinforcing energy from the speakers.
TiMax sets up multiple image definitions, which are unique delay relationships between every source and each loudspeaker reinforcing it. These relationships are changed every time a performer moves to a different location onstage. The TTA system tracked each actor's movement while TiMax responded automatically to move their radio mics onto the corresponding image definitions.
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