The Shanghai Culture Square was the setting for a recent production of Mozart!, staged by German production company La Belle Musical. Treating Chinese fans of musical theatre to its high-tech contemporary scenography and period costumes, the show features advanced spatial sound design by award-winning Swiss designer, Tom Strebel of audiopool.

The production tracks the life and works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart using a sound system brought in from Germany by Feedback Show Systems, who purchased a TiMax SoundHub audio delay-matrix processor to meet Strebel’s exacting spatial system spec.

For Strebel, the use of TiMax to manage a full company of radio-miked actors across a distributed speaker system was a given: ‘It is simply not satisfying without,’ he explains. ‘I have used TiMax for almost every production since 2006 when I did the sound design for Basel Tattoo. For me, there is no alternative.’

For Mozart!, the theatre’s main LR house system comprised 24 JBL active line array cabinets for the band and music mix elements. The distributed vocal system used three L-Acoustics ARCS Wide as a point sources at the proscenium, supporting further vocal system elements served by eight Turbosound TFH 600H cabinets. There were also four front fills at the proscenium and two L-Acoustics X12 Coax boxes as out fill. Three L-Acoustics X8 loudspeakers provide under-balcony delay.

‘When everything is set correctly the final result is absolutely pure and natural music,’ says Tom Strebel. ‘No unwanted delays and echoes and everything in place.’ He adds, ‘It is very important for me, that in all of the seats in a theatre you hear the actor from where he actually is on stage; so you hear a voice where it is generated instead of coming out of a loudspeaker. This can only be achieved by an active level/time matrix, and hence only by TiMax.’

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