The Music of Zimmer vs Williams show at the Royal Albert Hall is the flagship date in the show’s annual programme of events. Mixed by FOH engineer Phil Wright from its inception, this year he added a spatial twist with the help of a 64-channel TiMax SoundHub – bringing the “beyond stereo” thinking he’d seen succeed on festival sites and other events. Used solely for this concert, TiMax SoundHub segued simply into the audio set-up, driving each component of the Hall’s PA individually. With object based mixing it was then possible to expand the score into the available space whilst also building a spatialisation tuned for every seat in the house.
The show itself is a cinematic battle of epic proportions, pitting the biggest Hans Zimmer and John Williams scores from five decades of cinema history against one another on the concert stage. Zimmer’s bold, immersive soundscapes are set against Williams’ timeless melodies. The Royal Albert Hall gives the music the space to be truly cinematic, with an augmented London Concert Orchestra of seven French horns, six trumpets, five trombones, two tubas and a massive five-man percussion section filling the room.
Led by Project Manager Laurence Jarrett, with Phil at the console, the in-house team has delivered large-scale orchestral shows in the venue since the department was established in 2015.
TiMax segued into the house system with ease. Accurate speaker positions and angles were imported into SoundHub ahead of the event and precise level and delay times were calculated from each of the Hall’s loudspeakers to each source on stage. On the day, the matrix dropped straight into the sound system in place of the existing delay times and sounded almost perfect from the off, with a brief sound check refining the last few per cent before the orchestra began at 11am. The inputs were grouped to mirror the orchestra’s layout, with the string and woodwind families split into objects matching their positions on stage and everything else running one-for-one, for a system of 64 inputs and 40 outputs.
The Hall’s staging climbs 2.4 metres from the front of the stage to the back, rising 40 centimetres per riser, so instruments on the risers sit further from the PA than those on the flat – a noticeable height difference that is traditionally not accounted for in the sound system. But because SoundHub works with height as well as level and delay, that extra dimension was carried into the spatialisation, holding the imaging together as the staging rose.
“The imaging held together as you went up the building, not just across it,” said Dan Higgott, TiMax Product and Software Manager. “The perception of listening to a sound system disappears. You focus entirely on the performance, with no impression of amplified sound, because SoundHub’s delay panning aligns every source wavefront back to the musician on stage.”
Phil Wright was unequivocal about the outcome. “I can honestly say that was the best sounding show I’ve ever mixed in that room. The level of clarity and detail in every orchestral instrument, coupled with the accurate localisation of sources, made for an absolutely magical experience out front.”
He drew a direct line to studio practice. “It works exactly the same way as object-based mixing in the studio. I find myself needing less EQ, much less dynamics processing, and I have much higher headroom and gain before feedback than traditional bus-based mixing.”
The venue’s in-the-round layout made the point sharper still. “In a proscenium-arch situation you could delay groups or input channels on the console to be correct for an audience in one dimension. But the unique 360-degree configuration of the Royal Albert Hall, coupled with TiMax’s ability to combine height into its spatialisation, meant that every tier of that stage was in time with the PA for everyone in the auditorium. The result was simply stunning.”
Laurence Jarrett was impressed with the sound, and the verdict was echoed from an unusually well-placed quarter when the show’s conductor sought Phil out between performances. “Normally, if I’m doing a good job, nobody says anything all day,” said Wright. “But I’ve never had a conductor come to me between shows to say his guests found it absolutely astounding.”
