P00 P6 MAY MONTH 2019
W
ith a pedigree of some 25 years, Spacemap is hardly a new technology. Its spatial audio processing has been featured in various productions across the Vegas, West End and Broadway diaspora, as well as in theme parks and many other attractions that love to take you for a ride, but until now its unique properties have not yet been exploited in live sound for concert and touring. This year’s Prolight + Sound show promised to change all that, with regular demonstrations – in a brand new wing of the Frankfurt Messe – of the prototype of a new version of Spacemap called, appropriately enough, Spacemap LIVE. This heritage is something of a USP for Meyer Sound, which can confidently point to real-world experience of immersive audio that stretches further back than any other company now engaged in it. Overall, though, the market should welcome this expansion of activity into live sound, which needs a few more shots in the arm in order to catch up with multimedia production, just as the digital console and the IEM markets needed more players out there in the field to get the crowds on their feet back in the day. This is the final frontier, after all. Flow rider As designers of IEM, line arrays and digital mixing consoles have all witnessed over the last 20 years, the live sound workflow is a place where angels fear to tread. Until you have won over the hearts and minds of committed and exacting sound engineers in systems, monitoring and FOH, you have nothing. You can only win at this game if you can smoothly integrate your innovation within touring systems almost without their users noticing. In common with the other spatial systems addressing this market today, Spacemap LIVE does this consummately. It had to. Meyer Sound’s strategic position was made very clear by recent activity in this sector, especially given that the default, anecdotal and entirely unofficial trinity of market leaders in loudspeakers for touring still includes the brand from Berkeley. The other two will have to be left to the imagination, but put it this way: now there are three offering a bespoke spatial processing package in order to keep them somewhere near that pole position. Meyer’s Prolight demo featured Nina, not a new Meyer box but a female vocalist from Amsterdam; Pro Tools backing tracks; and a “mainstream” Avid console: simplicity itself. Up to 32 outputs from this or any other suitable desk are fed to a single Meyer Sound Galaxy 816 Audio Processor where all the spatial magic happens, and this is important. Instead of having to build a new box into which to put these tricks, Meyer has utilised an established platform with thousands of users worldwide – something of an immersive Trojan horse – with the details of the Spacemap LIVE upgrade yet to be finalised. The one break with normal workflow, at least for
On the
PSNEurope’s Phil Ward witnesses the new generation of Meyer Sound’s im introduction of a new version of Spacemap for live music installations, Spac Meyer's director of spatial sound, Steve Ellison, and of digital product experi
IN THEATRE THE MUSIC IS THERE IN SUPPORT OF THE ACTION. BUT NOW THE FOCUS IS ON MUSIC 100 PER CENT STEVE ELLISON
www.psneurope.com
the demo, was the use of three iPads for the GUI. New software is to be released that creates a ‘spatial mix position’, and the use of these iPads divided the interface into various visible pages from macro to micro mixing throughout the Galaxy matrix. Of particular note is Spacemap LIVE’s ability to mix reverberation returns spatially for relatively static mixes, in a way far more natural than the conventional pinning of a reverb tail on the signal donkey and, with the likelihood that very limited motion will suit most concert music applications of immersive audio, this is crucial. Equally important is Spacemap LIVE’s complete integration into existing show files and content, including groups or stems, with no need to rebuild the rest of the mix around it. “Spacemap was developed for music originally,” confirms Meyer Sound's director for Spatial Sound, Steve Ellison, who wrote the algorithm, “but it was then adopted by and adapted for live theatre and Cirque du Soleil-style spectaculars. "Last year, we had the opportunity to sponsor Moogfest, the art and technology festival in North Carolina, and used it to create an immersive system for