Out Board has announced that The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England has once again opted for TiMax in recently implementing a SoundHub-S64 with MADI in the main 1,200-seat theatre’s sound control in addition to upgrading the 450-seat Swan Theatre to the latest TiMax FPGA spatial audio core in an installation supplied, supported and installed by HD Pro Audio.
RSC head of sound Jeremy Dunn says, “The joy of TiMax of course is that it’s developed for the needs of theatre and works just as we need it to. TiMax just makes everything else work smoothly and for us it’s imperative that it’s there. TiMax doesn’t colour the sound so what you put in you get out, which is really important for us.”
TiMax serves as a multi-channel loudspeaker management system that is controlled separately from the sound designer and mixing console by the production sound technician. Dunn notes that the sound designer will never touch it as, “It has to be available for us to make minor adjustments when we need to. It may be a silent partner in the audio chain, but it’s imperative that it’s there and reliably doing its job — and we feel at ease connecting with it.”
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s thrust stage is a primary reason TiMax plays an important role. While affording the audience very good sightlines for the performances, the stage is challenging from an audio perspective. With the seating effectively wrapped around the stage in rows up to 80 seats wide, delay times to the circa 65 delay loudspeakers in the auditorium need to be accurately managed to ensure proper alignment and accurate spatial localisation.
In addition, a thrust stage offers numerous possibilities for set design. As sets change, however, so do the loudspeaker positions and their time alignment. Dunn points to TiMax for the simplicity of its interface saying, “It’s a lot easier now to simply time align speakers when they’re moved, and we have far greater control over the system.” The production sound technician is able to move to each delay position and simply update time alignment and EQ on a PC or Mac primed with TiMax software, leaving the desk operator free, as he puts it, “to do the best job they possibly can.”
Dunn concludes, “In short, it’s totally reliable and is ready to use whenever we need it and it doesn’t colour the sound. It also gives us a greater degree of control over the sound system so that we can fire up the system and easily make adjustments to make the sound better: and it’s tiny adjustments like that, which make all the difference.”
