Central Europe’s outdoor performance tradition determinedly eschews standard staging formats, seeking instead challenging environments to deliver tales to audiences of thousands. Set in a rock labyrinth with certain upstage scene elements offset at heights up to 25m above the main stage area, the Luisenburg-Festspiele performing arts theatre in Wunsiedel is Germany’s oldest outdoor stage, and recently turned to TiMax SoundHub to deliver intelligible immersive audio to its 2,000-strong audience.
System-Sound Designer David Horn maintains four TiMax SoundHub showcontrol systems at his disposal, but used a single 64-channel unit activated for real-time vocal localisation driven by a new TiMax TrackerD4, recently purchased from the TiMax German Distributor, Pro-Audio Technik. ‘I use TiMax because it is the only system that has such experience and proven longevity in theatre world but specifically, because of the dimensions of this stage TiMax was necessary for the audience to tell on the stage who is singing or talking,’ he explains. ‘By using TiMax we guarantee a higher level of attention from the audience – particularly for the performances for children. It was very noticeable when we stage at the beginning of the season in May, that the younger viewers were very focused and engaged with the play. So using TiMax has made a real difference here.’
Eight TiMax Tracker sensors – some mounted on trees and rocks – covered the 38m-wide and 25m deep performance area, complete with one section of stage that rises into the hillside to a height of 25m. The system captured every movement from 24 TiMax Tracker UWB RF Tags worn by the performers moving through the space.
TiMax SoundHub is unique in its ability to translate the experience of audio coming from a height into the 3D soundscape received by the audience. It is able to convey such finer nuances of performances in a wide variety of environments due to its highly-evolved speciality of rendering audio spatialisation with both level and delay as opposed to simple level-panning.
With on-site support from TiMax Product Manager Dan Roncoroni and Director Dave Haydon, Horn established 30 image definitions across the stage plus others accommodating the upper woodland levels. TiMax was primarily used to enhance vocal intelligibility but was also used to distribute the audio within the space for spot effects.
The loudspeaker system distributed under the canopy in front of the hillside stage comprised main line array systems with a total of six high Ritterbusch Audio Q80 loudspeakers, complementing two centre array hangs each with three high Q40 units all from the local German company. Also supplied were eight B-18 sub bass units with four B-15 centrally placed subs, eight T6 for near fill and 16 LDK81 line array modules providing audience delay reinforcement. Weatherproofed Bose 802 speakers were place at three locations on the upstage hillside, acting as localisation anchors for these distant performance areas. TiMax and the event’s Yamaha PM5 Rivage main console were all hooked up via Dante.
‘The vital features of TiMax that made short work of the sound planning were the Mixer and PanSpace features,’ Horn concludes.
More: https://timaxspatial.com
