The Platinum Jubilee celebrated earlier this year to mark the 70th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne, staged around the Queen Victoria Monument directly outside Buckingham Palace in London, was supported by a sound design by Ben Milton Associates that incorporated an Out Board TiMax SoundHub spatial audio engine at its core.
The event had two end-on stages, north and south, radiating outwards from the palace railings, a smaller palace stage positioned between them in the palace forecourt plus a main central 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,” explains Ben Milton.
The event was produced by BBC Studios via broadcast sound supervisors Kevin Duff and Andy Deacon of Zen Broadcast, and the staging concept was designed by Ric Lipson of Stufish. Britannia Row Productions, based in nearby Twickenham, supplied the sound reinforcement system.
According to Milton, he selected SoundHub as the starting point of his design because of it’s ability to natively simplify an audio environment in delivering multiple sources to any system of loudspeakers and then facilitating its regeneration into an optimized 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 adds.
A matching pair of 64-channel TiMax SoundHub delay-matrix spatial processors were supplied by TiMax manufacturers Out Board to provide redundancy for the high-profile event broadcasting live to air. Milton’s initial design accommodated what he says “became four events, all very different in concept, and each using the audio department’s timecode output to trigger every other aspect of the shows, from lighting, projection mapping and even drones.”
A multichannel distributed L-Acoustics loudspeaker configuration served the four grandstand seating blocks opposite the stages and around the main QVM stage. All stages were mixed and controlled via a DiGiCo consoles, bused through to a master Quantum SD7 and then bused via Dante and AES to TiMax, where the final mix was distributed via Dante over fiber to the pre-imaged and delay-matrixed loudspeaker positions.
Having not worked with TiMax before, Milton took a few trips to Out Board’s facility in Cambridge to get familiar with the platform and to meet with director Robin Whittaker, who also spent several days on site to support the pre-show setup.
“We had a two-day on-site set up period and TiMax transferred perfectly. 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 honor to be involved in this historic event, but actually, what we discovered – Mark Edwards, my system engineer and I — is that TiMax is the way you should approach any show, even if you’re not using it for 3D spatial placement. The ease of planning the pre-production which you need on your system before getting onto site is second to none. You can accurately time your whole system before you’ve even walked into the venue.”
