Spatial Audio Moves Into Mid-Size Venues And Museums

Two installations announced nine days apart show how quickly object-based audio has moved down the market. In Fayetteville, Georgia, the 2,200-seat Box auditorium at Trilith LIVE completed a d&b audiotechnik Soundscape 180-degree system, announced on 6 October. The three-tier theatre wraps the audience 180 degrees around a thrust stage and puts no seat more than 75 feet from the performance, the geometry that defeats a conventional left-right PA. The system pairs SL-Series line arrays and subwoofers with A-Series augmented arrays, and runs En-Scene object positioning and En-Space room emulation on dual DS100 Signal Engines. Acoustics and AV design came from Threshold Acoustics, integration from 3G Productions.

Four days later, on 10 October, the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Public Science Center opened at Boston's Museum of Science with a comparable stack: Ars Electronica's Deep Space projection, six movable LED video walls, a d&b Soundscape audio system and Blackmagic 4K capture for live streaming, inside a glass pavilion overlooking the Charles River, funded by a 155 million dollar Bloomberg Philanthropies gift. A science centre and a touring-grade music room have little in common operationally, yet both concluded that loudspeaker-by-loudspeaker control was the cheapest way to make one room serve many formats. That is the shift worth noting: spatial audio is no longer the signature of a flagship concert hall, it is becoming a default answer to the question of how a multi-purpose room should sound.

The engineering consequence lands in the rack, not the ceiling. Object-based audio addresses loudspeakers individually, so a 180-degree design with seven main hangs, five subwoofer hangs and 44S front fills built into the mechanical stage lifts is a system with dozens of amplified channels and a matrix of delays. At The Box, dual DS100 engines connect through DS10 Audio Network Bridges, which means the processor sits on the audio network rather than at the end of an analogue snake, and the room's fifteen coverage profiles live as ArrayCalc files recalled through R1 presets. Threshold's Maddie Daily also makes a point that matters for any venue with neighbours: because level and delay are distributed across many loudspeakers, perceived loudness is high while measured SPL is lower than a traditional system. Add cardioid pattern control that keeps the stage quiet for performers, and spatial audio starts to look like a noise-management tool as much as an artistic one.

For integrators, the practical requirements are channel density, clocking and headroom. Budget amplifier and DSP channels for the fully populated room, not the opening configuration, because the reason to buy object-based processing is that the layout will change. Put audio endpoints on the network with PoE so the analogue copper count does not grow with the channel count, and treat PTP clocking and latency as design constraints rather than commissioning surprises. Amtune supplies the transport layer around that processing: Dante and AES67 audio interfaces, Dante audio modular cards and AES67 audio modular cards for distributed channels, plus HD video seamless hybrid matrices and AV extenders where the same room also carries video to LED walls or projection. All units are built under an ISO 9001 quality system and tested to CE, FCC and RoHS. Integrators can request signal chain drawings at sales@amtune.com.