Small Venues Become Broadcast Production Facilities

Apple opened Apple Music Hall inside Battersea Power Station in London on 28 September with a set by Elton John, and the specification is a useful marker of where performance venues are heading. The room holds 600 people, which is small by touring standards, and it carries a 38 foot stage that reconfigures between a conventional front facing layout and in the round, a 48 speaker system distributed around the audience for Spatial Audio presentation, two recording and mixing studios behind the stage, and infrastructure hardwired for 16 or more cameras feeding a purpose built broadcast control room. iPhone capture runs alongside broadcast cameras. Shows are streamed internationally through Apple Music, and the wider complex also houses new Apple Music Radio studios. The opening season runs into December with Baby Keem, Troye Sivan, Arlo Parks, Burna Boy and Charli xcx on the calendar.

The design idea is not complicated: one performance should leave the building as several products. A live mix for the room, a multitrack recording, a Spatial Audio mix that can be finished live or afterwards, and a multi-camera video programme for streaming. Venues have been capable of each of those separately for decades. What is new is that a 600 seat room is now expected to deliver all four from the same evening without moving the production to a studio, which means the AV infrastructure is no longer an accessory to the stage but the thing that determines what the show can become.

That has direct consequences for the signal chain. Audio has to divide four ways - front of house, monitors, broadcast mix and recording - from one stage box without ground loops or level compromises, which is a Dante or AES67 problem solved with separate flows and a single clock, not with a pile of splitters. Video has to be routed rather than daisy chained: 16 cameras is a router with genlock, tally and a multiviewer for the director, and the same feed has to reach a confidence monitor at front of house, a record rack and an encoder. Latency budgets then diverge by destination. Image magnification in the room has perhaps one frame to play with, while a stream can buffer a second without anyone noticing, so the two paths should not share a processing chain that was tuned for the slower one. And because the stage reconfigures, the cabling has to be patchable and documented per layout, or every change becomes an engineering project.

The lesson for integrators working on smaller venues is to define the outputs before choosing the matrix. A room that will only ever drive a projector and four speakers needs a switcher. A room that might host a livestream, a recording session and a radio broadcast needs independent outputs, per-output scaling and a fixed EDID on every destination so that a monitor arriving late cannot renegotiate the show. Amtune supplies multi-viewers, seamless hybrid matrix processors and Dante and AES67 audio interfaces for venues that have to serve the room and the broadcast at the same time, with the routing fixed at commissioning rather than discovered at soundcheck. Venue schematics to sales@amtune.com.