Staged around the Queen Victoria Monument directly outside Buckingham Palace, the televised Queen’s Platinum Jubilee event saw Ben Milton placing TiMax SoundHub at the core of his sound design.

Headlined by Queen + Adam Lambert, the event used two end-on stages, North and South (designated Orchestral and Pop stages), radiating outwards from the palace railings, a smaller Palace Stage positioned between them in the Buckingham Palace forecourt, plus the main central Queen Victoria Monument (QVM) stage at the front of the Victoria Monument.

‘To accommodate the four key stages, four different environments needing to be imaged, allowing me to apply multiple delays to each single source and provide super clean audio from a broadcast perspective, there was only one way I could go and that was with TiMax,’ Milton explains.

The event was produced by BBC Studios, with Kevin Duff and Andy Deacon of Zen Broadcast serving as broadcast sound supervisors, and staging design by Ric Lipson of Stufish. Working with Ben Milton Associates, Britannia Row supplied the audio package, which included an L-Acoustics K2/K3 PA and DiGiCo desks for both live and broadcast. 

‘DiGiCo are my go-to desks,’ Milton says. ‘They sound fantastic, and with multiple artists and their engineers coming in, I knew the DiGiCo brand would be something that everyone would be happy to work with.’

Milton allocated two engineers per stage, as well as another handling the spoken word/presenter sections of the show. The broadcast audio department followed suit, with a truck per stage and a fourth gallery truck.

‘Bill Birks, who mixed monitors on the Orchestral stage, had a busy time of it with a maxed-out Quantum 7,’ says Milton. ‘Simon Fox was on FOH there, while Phil Down and Stefano Serpagli mixed monitors and FOH, respectively, on the Pop stage. There was also James Neale mixing monitors on the Queen Victoria Memorial stage, Chris Vass at FOH, and Chris Coxhead covering FOH duties for the spoken word portions. All in all, we were one big happy audio family.’

Milton took the TiMax SoundHub spatial audio engine as the starting point of his audio design because of its ability to natively simplify an audio environment, delivering multiple audio sources to any system of loudspeakers then facilitating its regeneration into an ideal listening environment. ‘With TiMax, we were able to redeploy every loudspeaker with an individual time on it so they would image back to where it was coming from, and the performance would stay locked in musically,’ he says.

A matching pair of 64-channel TiMax SoundHub delay-matrix spatial processors were supplied by TiMax manufacturer Out Board, ensuring redundancy for the high-profile event broadcasting live to air. Milton’s initial design accommodated what ‘…became four events, all very different in concept, and each using the audio department’s time code output to trigger every other aspect of the shows, from lighting, projection mapping and even drones.’

A distributed L-Acoustics sound system served the four grandstand seating blocks opposite the stages, and around the main QVM stage. All stages were served by individual DiGiCo mixing consoles, bused through to a master DiGiCo Quantum SD7, then via Dante and AES to TiMax, where the final mix was distributed via Dante over fibre to the pre-imaged and delay-matrixed loudspeaker positions.

Having not had his hands on TiMax before, Milton worked in a few trips to Cambridge to meet with Out Board Director Robin Whittaker, who also spent several days on site helping to bed in the final set up pre-show. What particularly impressed Milton was the accuracy of the transfer from his offline design to online.

‘We had a two-day on-site set up period and TiMax transferred perfectly,’ Milton says. ‘The top of The Mall is a huge area and TiMax delivered a system perfectly in time, which is just amazing. We had a functioning system on day one and went straight into orchestral rehearsal day two. Incredible.

‘Not only was it a great honour to be involved in this historic event, but actually, what we discovered – Mark Edwards, my system engineer, and I – is the way you should approach TiMax for any show, even if you’re not using it for 3D placement. The ease of planning the pre-production that you need on your system before getting on site is second to none. You can accurately time your whole system before you’ve even walked into the venue.’