The Muzeum Historii Polski – The Polish History Museum – has won the world’s attention by winning a Prix Versailles for its exploration of the country’s history. The award highlights the world’s most beautiful public and commercial buildings, but the appeal of the Polish History Museum is more than skin deep.
Serious in its pursuit of visitor engagement and experience, the museum wanted the highest levels of immersive suspension and chose the submission by ESS Audio, Polish distribution partner for TiMaxSpatial, for its audio integration. Two TiMax SoundHub spatialisation engines serve two performance venues, creating sophisticated object-based soundscapes rendered by the platform’s dynamic delay-matrix processing.
In each of the spaces, the multifunctional Auditorium Hall and the Cinema and Theater Hall, ESS Audio installed flexible distributed immersive systems built around the spatial audio capabilities of TiMax to ensure an authentic and natural soundscape for visitors. Additionally, a sound and video production studio and modern conference rooms are equipped with the latest A/V solutions.
One of the greatest challenges ESS Audio had to contend with was architecture for which the museum has won awards. The lively interior acoustics meant that a ‘standard’ audio set-up would not work, whereas the TiMax distributed and targeted spatial audio solution helped tame the space. The result is an immersive implementation the gives the impression of the sound system interacting with the natural acoustics of both spaces.
Among other events, The Auditorium Hall is used to host acoustic and classical concerts. ‘The immersive system is very helpful in this case to obtain the natural sound of acoustic instruments and high audio resolution for each listening position,’ says ESS Audio’s Maciej Barański.
‘We opted for TiMax due to the naturalness of the sound and we have seen that producers appreciate the simplicity of work when mixing sound here. In addition, the possibility of very suggestive identification of the sound source coinciding with the physical location on the stage elevates the listening experience for the audience, which adds to the sophistication and appeal of the venue.’
The Cinema and Theatre Hall is intended for theatre performances where the vocal localisation of the actors is crucial, and the TiMax on-board 64-track playback engine also gets used for sound effects for productions.
ESS Audio employed a live performance spatial sound configuration for the Auditorium Hall, where TiMax drives a system comprised of four hangs of JBL VTX A8 loudspeakers with front fill supplied by JBL VTX A6 loudspeakers supported by JBL VTX B18 sub-bass units. Delay through the space is handled by JBL CBT70 supported by Sonance PS-C83T ceiling speakers. The sound mix is handled by DiGiCo Quantum 338 and 225 desks.
The Cinema and Theatre Hall features a similarly configured but smaller system, also with a JBL speaker system spatially processed by TiMax feeding Crown amplification and BSS Audio DSP via Dante signal distribution. A Yamaha CL5 and CL1 integrate with TiMax via Midi.
‘Thanks to TiMax processors, there are no better or worse seats in either room,’ Barański says. ‘The audience could hear the same sound scene for each of them.
‘The museum is a very multifunctional space. Each hall has a cinema function and enables the organisation of acoustic concerts thanks to active and amplified reverberation time control systems. With TiMax at the heart of the system, the sound system can be easily reconfigured to suit whatever happens in the space.
‘Both the end-user of the system and sound engineers who had the opportunity to work with it rate the installation very positively, emphasising the naturalness of the sound and the highly suggestiveness of the immersive effect.’
