Imagine audio as moving pictures on a screen. Would you prefer HD colour to grainy black and white? Flat-screen ergonomics to bulky tubes with one available aspect ratio? Well, you may not – but when people stop visiting your museum collection you’ll be on your own. Audio has the potential to match all of the latest attractions in video, if you know where to look… and listen. And without it only digital signage is going to do its job properly.
The live sound industry has been transformed by wave after wave of remarkable innovations, making it the biggest earner for everyone in the music industry, just as the revenues from recorded music have declined. But it’s not enough to put the artist on the stage and shout, as did the members of Joy Division to a reluctant Ian Curtis, “sing, you twat.”
Audiences expect – and get – sound that more closely resembles what they own on vinyl, CD or laptop than ever before, and it’s this validation of the presence of the artist that puts the bums on the seats and buys the drinks. Live sound is, quite literally, right on the money. How do they do it?
Immersive sound
By far the most exciting development in live sound currently is the technique variously described as ‘immersive’, ‘360’ or ‘spatialised’ audio, a paradigm shift from channel-based mono or stereo into object-based reproduction: each individual sound source becomes a movable ‘object’ in a 180° or 360° field. It’s challenging, but there’s no doubting its impact on the listening experience.
“Over the past decade we’ve seen how sound has become increasingly critical to the immersive model,” says Matt Czyzewski, president of Renkus-Heinz, the maker of high-end sound reinforcement loudspeakers in California. “Technologies such as digitally steerable audio help place specific sound on specific locations. This allows a theatre to wrap a viewer in the audio experience as much as the video offering. It allows for walkable installations to alter sound as customers progress. And it has allowed some of the most intricately designed spaces – such as ornate churches – to improve audio quality across the board. The result in each is bringing the audience closer to the performance, no matter what that performance may be. It’s an empowerment of the performer and the audience.”
The challenges are faced not by audiences, but by production companies. “For rental companies, audio takes the longest to get a return on investment,” says Steve Jones, application support and education at d&b audiotechnik, home of the Soundscape immersive audio platform, “even though eventually it has greater shelf life than video and lighting. Plus, most people think ‘immersive’ means putting speakers everywhere, so production will hate that. In fact, it’s more or less the same gear used differently.”
If these challenges are overcome, we may even see a new branch of the audio profession coming to light. “In pop and rock there is always a defined video designer and lighting designer – never a defined sound designer,” says Scott Sugden, product manager at L-Acoustics, who regularly supports his company’s L-ISA Live shows – a proprietary immersive format gaining many followers.
“Even in theatre it’s the musical director or the composer who has the ideas; the sound guy’s job is just to reproduce them. However, I do believe that these conversations are going to start happening.”
In common with previous live sound game-changers such as in-ear monitoring, line array loudspeaker configurations and digital mixing consoles, the immersive audio workflow will take time to win over busy and dedicated sound engineers. The key will be the almost seamless integration of its techniques into everyday touring systems in a way that does not interrupt their deployment.
Digital and networking
Digital consoles are now universal. It has meant a sea-change in technique, but the benefits bring almost studio-quality sound to the live arena –
particularly through the use of digital signal processing (DSP) stages inside the console known as plug-ins. “When Avid went into live sound I saw
a natural step from studio world to live world through plug-ins,” says Chris Lambrechts, application specialist for live sound at Avid, the digital console manufacturer. “The digital revolution began in the studio, and by the time (Avid’s leading console) VENUE Profile was launched, most studios had gone digital, but digital live consoles were still new. Avid’s major contribution was to migrate that studio digital technology to live sound – today including theatre and live broadcast as well as touring.”
DSP, by which the audio signal can be manipulated with unprecedented flexibility, is now married to digital audio networking, so that access to and dispersion of the audio can take place over Ethernet-enabled rings and devices. Even lighting companies are now seeing the benefits of connecting audio in this way, including Belgian-based Luminex Network Intelligence and its data distribution equipment for pro audio, lighting and video. As these markets converge, CEO Bart Swinnen observes many synergies.
“Since we moved into audio and video,” he says, “and support for advanced clocking mechanisms, we’ve seen that they have much more sophisticated protocols than lighting. Timing is much more accurate, sample and refresh rates are much higher and so is bandwidth usage, so the impact of shaping it and running it at the right priority on the network is way more critical. And for AV, unlike broadcast, the video must remain compressed for the greatest efficiency.”
Yorick Brunke, of Germany’s pro audio network designer Optocore, points out that a fibre-optic infrastructure is arguably the most efficient for live sound. “We are protocol-independent,” he says, “because the conventional way of protocol transport is for the device to decode it, work with it and then, at the other end, put out either the same or a different protocol. The key is this decoding and manipulation. Optocore’s networks simply ‘tunnel’ the protocols without decoding – we don’t look at them or touch them. It’s transportation, and that’s it. We can even convert from one protocol to another without decoding it. With our Festival Box, that happens in conjunction with multiplexing so you can have unlimited channels on one fibre.”
The theatre market
Ornate theatre spaces need inch-perfect sound reinforcement, and in the last few years some highly sophisticated measures have emerged. It’s even possible that a fusion of column arrays – small line arrays encased in a single box – and immersive audio will change the game completely.
Jamie Gosney is an audio system designer at Stage Electrics, a UK specialist installer offering sound system design for every kind of live performance space – not least theatre. “There’s a number of good products out there right now,” he says, “but I’ve favoured the K-Array. It’s discreet, really good quality… not cheap, but it does the job in hand very well. It’s powerful, and the vertical dispersion from the column is very narrow – you can direct it where it needs to be and keep it off hard surfaces like the front of the balcony. Equally importantly, it fits into the fabric of the building architecturally and when a touring company comes in the theatre does not have to take it down.”
Stage Electrics has refurbished The Bristol Hippodrome, The King’s Theatre in Glasgow and The Edinburgh Playhouse, among many others, with permanently installed theatre systems designed for whatever type of production takes place. “We’re being asked to take down traditional theatre systems and remove all the black boxes – point source loudspeakers mounted on the prosceniums – and replace them with small, discreet columns very often covered in an acoustically transparent material that matches their housing,” Gosney adds.
The art of mixing
Musicality is at the heart of pro audio systems. Seasoned Front-of-House sound engineer Steve ‘Patto’ Pattison suggests that the evolution of the modern PA system is liberating his profession. “You get to relate the system to the style of music,” he reveals. “For example, if it’s jazz you can equalise the frequencies to remove unwanted sources at 8k and 60Hz. You’ve got the framework, and you get to colour it in according to what the music demands: do you want a ‘60s Tamla kind of thing?; or a disco thing?; or dance, or rock, or thrash metal…? Everything has its own textures, and you can steer the system in that direction. But – and this is the fun bit – you can model a C&W sounding drum kit in amongst something completely different, or whatever strikes you creatively.”
And creativity is the defining outcome: pro audio is not plumbing. Audio quality has advanced at every stage of the signal chain from microphone to loudspeaker, revealing new details and ranges of mood that the engineer can exploit. “You do get the chance to change or undo everything instantly, and to switch from thrash metal, to country, to rock… with any effect you want at your fingertips. Everything’s in wide screen, in vivid colours.”
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