As immersive audio is experiencing traction stateside in houses of worship and other live performance applications, listening sessions for audio industry VIPs is also happening in London.
The historic Hackney Empire on Mare Street in the London Borough of Hackney, built in 1901, was recently the location for three days of demonstrations of 3D sound by Astro Spatial Audio, hosted by Bedfordshire's 2B Heard. Immersive audio is gaining serious traction stateside, too.
The event marked the first full UK demonstrations of Astro Spatial Audio’s immersive audio solution. A guest list of industry VIPs responded, including more than 50 industry influencers, gathered to experience two full demos designed to illustrate Astro Spatial Audio’s extraordinary scalability, according to the company's press release.
For the first demonstration, the stage of the Hackney Empire was ringed with 16 pole-mounted K-Array Kayman KY102 line array columns configured for wide coverage plus eight overhead Domino KF210 enclosures and four Thunder-KMT218 double 18-inch subwoofers. Guests were invited to stroll freely around the stage as they experienced phase-free, seamless 3D audio courtesy of a single 3RU Astro Spatial Audio SARA II Rendering Engine, calculating the position of each audio object in real time. In addition, with just two microphones positioned above the stage, attendees experienced the SARA II’s interactive room acoustics module, transforming the Hackney Empire into entirely different acoustic space with the press of a single button.
Finally, the audience was moved into the theatre’s main auditorium, where the same fully immersive, seamless performance was repeated with just five K-array Firenze KH7 speakers and two Firenze KS8 subwoofers. "Guests reacted with a mixture of delight and astonishment," according to the release.
“Some people assume that immersive audio means filling a venue with speakers, and of course you can achieve more resolution that way, but it’s possible to achieve incredible results with a much more traditional system,” enthuses 2B Heard’s Dave Wooster. “Because Astro Spatial Audio is object-based, it’s completely scalable from one venue to the next with nothing more than the coordinates of a loudspeaker set-up.
“At the Hackney Empire, with a single SARA II, we switched from a set-up with 28 speakers to a basic left-centre-right configuration with two rear channels, and we did it at the touch of a button. That’s the kind of solution that professionals can take seriously.”
