Flux

On November 27th and 28th, together with Flux:: French partner Freevox, the Flux:: Spat Revolution team makes a stop in Paris for a series of presentations.

We welcome you all to join us and participate in our presentations of the Spat Revolution Immersive Audio Engine. Daily presentations on the 27th and 28th at 11.00 and 15.00.

More information and registration found here (in french)

Furthermore, in collaboration with SAE Paris, AES France and Merging Technologies, Flux:: is participating and presenting in a discussion about the latest audio tools and workflows for live shows – Audio for live shows : November 27th at 19.00.

Audio for live shows – New needs, new tools, new applications
The live show is constantly evolving with new challenges for the stage setup, made possible by the contribution of sound engineers and new technology.

Program
19.00 – Opening
19:30 – Presentation of Ovation and the workflow of theme parks, by Maurice Engler – Merging Technologies
20:15 – Presentation of Spat Revolution in live event environments, content creation and its usage in large scale live productions, by Hugo Larin – Flux:: Audio
21.00 – Ending

More details found here (in french)

Audio for live shows – Registration
https://colloque-audio-spectacle-vivant.eventbrite.co.uk/

The 2018 edition of JTSE will be held at Pharmacy Porte de la Chapelle, Paris (Subway “Porte de la Chapelle”), with over 140 national and international exhibitor companies from the main areas of stage technologies presenting their unique know-how, within; machinery, lighting, sound, stagecraft, rigging, fabrics, seating, accessories, safety gear and training.

JTSE 2018 – Registration
http://www.jtse.fr/en/demande-badge/
http://www.jtse.fr/en/

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Did you ever wonder about the processing behind the Spat Revolution Immersive Audio Engine? How latency is handled, or how Spat is handling speaker alignment to achieve smooth spatialization? Or are you interested in getting to know more about how Live Theatrical show setups can be done using Spat Revolution?

A blog read by Hugo Larin, Business Development for Spat Revolution

POWERING THE SPAT ENGINE, THE AUDIO INTERFACE AND THE SYSTEM LATENCY

Spat Revolution is a real time stand-alone software application for processing immersive audio, and regarding the processing behind it; although some immersive audio solutions will come with dedicated hardware with fix capacities, Spat doesn’t run on any specific hardware. The power of today’s modern computers have proven us what can be achieved, instead Windows and MacOS is supported, with hardware recommendations provided, a solid graphic card, sufficient amount of ram and multi core processing, in order to achieve good results.

The ability to run a generic hardware also means that a vast pool of audio interfaces are available for the system setup. You could obviously then feel like asking what the actual latency of the system is. In Spat Revolution the latency is defined by the audio hardware components (local audio interface or network AVB, Dante or AES67 virtual audio entities) and the buffer size. The system actually shows the total latency in a status window in the software, combining the OS reported latency of the audio component and the Spat buffer setting. The actual Spat setup and configuration (number of sources, rooms and such) don’t have impact on the latency. It’s predictable and fixed.

Figure 1: Hardware IO and Devices in Spat Revolution

When latency is critical we do have the option of a very low buffer size setting (again, taken the hardware qualification into account). Spat has been tested for In Ear Monitor scenarios, so this is a good example of how low latency can be achieved, as we know latency will be critical if delivering binaural content to a vocalist or musician.

Figure 2: Latency report in Spat Software

Multiple Rooms, Panning Techniques, Dealing with Speaker Setup for Live

SPEAKER ARRANGEMENT ALIGNMENT PROVIDED IN EACH SPAT ROOM

Although Spat is not intended to replace the loudspeaker management for tuning, it does offer the ability to compute each speaker output gain and delay in order to compensate for the location compromises that may need to be done because of physical limitations. The auto compute will make a delay and gain calibration to the central ref. point, when trying to provide extremely smooth transition and when your sources are actually moving in the soundscape all the time. Note that the actual panning computing will use the compensated speakers, the Virtual Speaker, resulting in very smooth feeling when moving the sources.

Figure 3: The Speaker Config window and the ability to ”Computer” Gain and Delay.

See physical location of speaker in grey and the virtual speaker in orange

More information on custom speaker arrangement available from the following Custom Speaker Configuration article

HOW USERS ARE DEPLOYING SPAT WITHIN LIVE AND THE ‘’VIRTUAL ROOM’’ SPEAKER ARRANGEMENTS

Spat Revolution is becoming more and more used in live theatrical shows, and many of these systems have common workflows. QLab is often used as the playback and show control system, while for live sound console the Avid VENUE S6L is often the console of choice. The Spat Send plugin is used, for example, in these scenarios to provide the mixing engineer with the ability to access the source parameters on the control surface, and for automating source parameter changes via the snapshot system. Something that can be done using generic OSC commands with other mixing system providing that ability, such as the Digico SD consoles.

That said, a common scenario is, using the QLab network cues to change any parameters of sources, rooms and reverb in Spat. This includes making 2D moves of sources in the soundscape. QLab is very common for show control, where their network and midi cues gets used to drive a variety of systems simultaneously. An interesting point of using QLab and Spat in the off location creation process is how you can start the show creation and move to separate computers and add audio mixing console in the equation.

The subject of remote control in itself will deserve a new blog!

The common integration varies from using 32, 64 or more console post fader channel audio feeds sent via MADI or Network audio to Spat, feeding the sources. Speaker outputs then either get returned to the desk in order to feed the various matrix of the mixing system, or are picked up directly by MADI or Network audio and sent to the loudspeaker management system.

In a recent big top production, Spat was dealing with a circular stage positioned at the center of the four big top masts. The audience was sitting on three of the faces, while the last face was the actual backstage. Each of the three audience spaces where covered from a L and R speaker cluster position on the mast, while a third speaker position was in the center at a higher elevation. A single behind stage L and R speaker cluster position was used as well (L and R when facing the main front face).

All around the big top was 6 rear ‘’surround’’ speakers, that were positioned in a way that each pair of 2 speakers where covering an audience space as rear speakers.

The multi-room concept was deployed for this. A first virtual room consisting of 5 outputs (L, C, R and 2 rears) similar to a surround was used to create a multichannel bed that was delivered to the 3 audience spaces. This allowed for delivery of an immersive base mix to each of the spaces using a VBAP panning technique.

While the rears were used for the base surround bed, a separate virtual Virtual room using the 6 surround speakers was deployed in order to be able to do rear effects to the complete audience, for example, when wanting to spin a sound around the big top. This virtual room included as well the backstage L and R speakers and the gain and delay alignment of Spat aligned all speakers to their virtual position. The key of adding the two backstage speakers was to give a feeling of sound coming from behind the stage or spinning behind the stage, and again, a VBAP panning technique was used for this virtual room.

Another Spat Room was using all single and cluster loudspeakers, this time with a KNN panning technique in order to allow to position a source anywhere in the audience, in order to really give the feeling that source was emanating from where the designer wanted or where the action was.

To complement this, some sources were able to be patched in a binaural room which became a feed that could be sent to recorders and to provide an spatial experience on headphones.

Figure 4: All Speaker with a KNN Pannings

Figure 5: 5.1 Soundscape deliver to multi zones

Figure 6: Various different Speaker Arrangements and Panning Types used simultaneously in one and the same project

Another theatrical project include the strategy of sending the 12 artist microphone post fader feeds to a Room for doing a real time tracking of these artists (actors on stage). Spat’s ability to integrate with the tracking system allowed for the attachment of tracking devices (know as beacons) to source actors. For this a DBAP panning technique was chosen, as no assumption could be made as too where the audience would be sitting and a central listening point didn’t exist. This provided a good signal distribution while offering some localisation, as the actors were being tracked on this very wide stage. A portion of the speaker rig was used for this one, where the 7 front clusters and their delays were used only. Another Room for a different effect and using a different set of loudspeakers was used too, which received sources from a fix number of console aux buses (send buses to the SPAT immersive audio software)

Spatially Yours!

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A blog read by Hugo Larin, Business Development for Spat Revolution

When you find yourself working on a custom multi-channel speaker arrangement, the Speaker Configuration editor is where a model of the sound diffusion system can be defined and stored into the list of speaker configuration presets. From the below image you can see that the current config (a system predefined config) can be, a Duplicate (a copy will be generated for editing) or a New config can be created.

Managing the Speaker Configuration includes the ability to delete a config, rename a config, export configuration(s) to a file, or import configuration(s) from a file. Note that Spat Revolution’s pre-defined speaker arrangements can’t be deleted or renamed, but duplicating them (making a copy) will allow you to edit the arrangement thus starting from an existing configuration. The Normalize feature is there to rapidly scale down the speaker arrangement to have the furthest away speaker distance set to 2M only. This helps reduce the virtual room environment size to facilitate working with the parameters range when working with very large speaker setups.

Figure 2: Editing a speaker configuration showing a copy of a 13.1 Auro 3D speaker arrangement

Once editing a speaker configuration, you can either + Add, – Del, Move Up or Move Down speakers in the list. Note that the total number of channels in your arrangement is denoted above the list. Your speaker system contains a Low Frequency LFE channel where you want the ability to send audio to it like on an aux system? Simply adding a channel (or channels), called LFE, will do the magic for you here directly. This particular channel won’t be fed from the virtual room panning, but by the LFE Send on each of the sources that will be available on rooms containing an LFE. Obviously without the room reverberation.

Speaker Position

Position information of the loudspeaker can be entered as X, Y, Z in meters or with Azimuth degree, Elevation degree and Distance in meters. Delay and Gain can be used to manually align the physical speaker location to a virtual one, essentially creating a virtual speaker.

Wondering what the Compute and Reset is all about? Spat Revolution can use the measurements you put into that speaker arrangement to calculate (and apply) the delays and gains for rendering spatial audio on a speaker physical configuration that may not have speakers located in ideal locations. This is a technique preconized when using panning methods that are sweet spot centric such as VBAP and VBIP. The methods will provide very smooth panning on arrangements that have all speaker equidistant to the optimum listening position. So this is what the compute will do for you when desired and using such panning method. You don’t need to move the speakers, Compute the delays and gain for optimal panning experience. Note that it is preferable to do this in Spat Revolution instead of external processing as Spat will use the computed speaker locations (the virtual speakers) for actually spatializing afterward. This is an advanced speaker management technique made easily accessible by a single press of the Compute Speaker Alignment button.

In some cases, creating speaker setups in an editor is not the most efficient way, primarily when such information is available as a list and was exported by an acoustic and design simulation software like those used with loudspeaker companies. So the speaker config work was already done onced. Although an advanced technique to be used with precaution, a Custom Speaker Arrangement file template is available from the Flux:: Support team that can allow you to enter your Speaker arrangement configuration along with the different speakers location in it. This methods allows to input speaker configuration (FromCartesian) raw data, Polar (FromSpherical) data, or by creating speaker layers with specific angles. All this can be quite practical for some larger more complex setups.

Spatially Yours!

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The Tonmeistertagung meet-up in Cologne, Germany, is a yearly congress and exhibition providing an extensive overview of the latest trends in the pro audio industry, gathering leading experts and professionals from the; broadcast, recording, theatre, film and television industry to share their experiences.

This year Flux:: is represented by the live sound engineer & S.E.A product specialist; Jonas Gehrmann, talking about the possibilities Immersive Audio currently offers, and how to create and build an Immersive sound experience for the audience using the AVID VENUE | S6L console and the Spat Revolution Immersive Audio Engine.

The Immersive Audio demonstrations are taking place in the AVID & S.E.A demo room; 2-Demo-H, setup for full on immersive audio integration demonstrations with the AVID S6L.

Daily 11.00, 13.00, 15.00 & 17.00 (Saturday only 11.00 & 13.00)

Tonmeistertagung 2018
https://tonmeistertagung.com/en/2018/

For the second time, the Student 3D Audio Competition for high-quality productions in Ambisonics 3D Audio is facilitated by the Tonmeistertagung. During the show, the jury presents the nominee productions in an ideal 3D audio listening environment, announce the winners, and hand out the awards.

Student 3D Audio Competition 2018
https://tonmeistertagung.com/en/2018/competition/

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Come and visit us at the International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition 2018 in Tokyo, November 14-16th, where you will find us together with our partner and distributor, Media Integration.

International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition, “The Professional Show for Audio, Video and Communications”, is a 3-day event being held from 14th November to the 16th November 2018 at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan.

This year at InterBee Flux:: founder and lead developer, Gaël Martinet, together with our Japanese partner, Media Integration (Hall 2 / 2115), will be presenting Spat Revolution Immersive Audio Engine and its unique features, high degree of create freedom, routing and transcoding capabilities, as well as Dolby Atmos, Ambisonics, NHK 22.2 and many of the additional formats supported by Spat Revolution.

The latest immersive audio workflow using Spat Revolution and ProTools will be presented at the Main Stage of Avid Japan – Everyday at 15:20

Together with Avid Live Sound partner Audio Brains, further presentations will focus on Avid VENUE S6L integration with the Spat Revolution Real Time Live Audio Engine. The presentations will discuss the integration of virtual source control in Avid S6L console and the power of the snapshot system to create automation with timing interpolation parameters.

Avid VENUE S6L integration with Spat Revolution at Audio Brains – Everyday at 14:00

More details can be found here (In Japanese)
https://connect.avid.com/InterBEE2018_JP.html#Boothmap

Media Integration at InterBee
https://www.inter-bee.com/en/forvisitors/exhibitor_info/detail.php?exhibitor_id=8277

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Today we release Spat Revolution version 1.1 containing a range of improvements and optimizations to the GUI, the Automation and OSC implementation, the Spat Plugins, the Speaker Configuration and the overall software stability

In addition to this, an extensive list of new features and functions has been implemented enhancing system configuration setup and external integration, and improving the user interaction and creative workflow, including:

Added local audio path support for AU, VST and AAX Spat Send and Spat Return Plugin

This provides the ability to route audio to and from your DAW software via AAX, AU and VST Spat Send and Return Plugins for a complete local integration on your local computer.

New speaker arrangement presets and enhanced Speaker Config dialog with normalization function, background image and new editing modes

This simplifies the creation and editing of speaker arrangements.

Added ability to change listener position with 6 degrees of freedom (X, Y, Z, Yaw, Pitch, Roll); working in all different room types (fully automatable)

Supporting Automation, OSC and Real Time Tracking System control.

Added Real Time tracking system integration (BlackTrax RTTrPM protocol) for sources and listener positions)

This provide the ability to integrate BlackTrax RTTpTM protocol for real-time tracking with tracking beacons assigned to a source or listener position.

Added support for non-relative direction of the source

This change the behavior of the source where instead of a continuous direction YAW following the center of the room or listening position, sources now have the option to keep their direction (YAW). Source to keep their direction YAW instead of always pointing to central reference point).

Added Reverb functions including “Late Reverb” Factor and “Main Reverb” Gain, Reverb Early/Cluster/Tail on/off per source and import and export preset function

This includes additions to reverb section of sources and main reverb section of each rooms

Other additions included

Improved multi-channel and multi-source handling with new source coordinate mode option. Polar and Cartesian are provided.

In Polar , AED (radiation) parameters will be sent by default to OSC whenever changing X,Y Z or AED parameters. . (Note the ability to force AED or XYZ in OSC preference for specific OSC Output slots) The Radiation system will be the internal functioning mode of coordinates and incoming XYZ parameters will be interpreted in Polar.

In Cartesian, XYZ coordinates will be sent by default to OSC whenever changing X,Y Z or AED parameters. (Note the ability to force AED or XYZ in OSC preference for specific OSC Output slots) The Cartesian position system will be the internal functioning mode of coordinates and incoming AED parameters will be interpreted in Cartesian.

Add duration to Spat Plug in parameters

Spat Send plugin now includes individual and global duration parameters to the Spat Send Plugin allowing to execute parameter changes in a set duration time.

Added HOA Decoder settings in transcoder

Added OSC Implementation

Implementation includes new ping pong property, OSC Message creation from Python, Send Objects Index as OSC argument and add a function that send all the position data (aed) simultaneously to the selected osc output. Duration and timing support

Added Master Routing patch options

Added Global Room Gain and room presence factor

Scaling factors added (distance, elevation, barycentric scale, and various others)

Added “Convert To Hardware IO” to convert blocks from Send/Return to Hardware IO

Optimizations

Enhancement for AAX VENUE S6L plug in including duration parameter attached to each Spat Plug in source parameters

The Spat Send plugin now includes individual and global duration parameters to the Spat Send Plugin allowing to execute parameter changes in a set duration time.

Enhanced HRTF implementation and HRTF files management

Optimized 3D Nebula display

General optimizations to the GUI, the Automation and OSC implementation, the Spat Plugins, the Speaker Configuration and the overall software stability

Full Release Notes
https://www.flux.audio/spat-revolution-v1-1-release-notes/

Demo Version
Spat Revolution is available for testing in full version with a 30-day time limited license.
https://www.flux.audio/spat-trial/

An iLok user account is required (No USB dongle needed).
https://www.ilok.com/#!ilok-intro

Download and Installation
Spat Revolution Version 1.1 can be downloaded and installed using Flux:: Center download and installation manager.
https://www.flux.audio/download/

How to download and install software using Flux:: Center
https://desk.flux.audio/hc/en-us/articles/360008191134-How-to-download-and-install-software-using-Flux-Center-

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Foto: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg

Technical Supplier: Feedback Show Systems & Service GmbH
Immersive Audio Consultants: Sphereo – Jonas Gehrmann & Fabian Knauber
Sound Designer: Cedric Beatty
FOH Engineer: Tobias Wallraff

October 11th this year the VIVID Grand show had its premiere at the Friedrichstadt-Palast theater, one of Europe largest and newest venues located in the theater district Mitte in Berlin.

The show is a declaration of love to life featuring more than 100 stunning artists on the world’s biggest theater stage, with a long-term residency plan and a production budget of 12 million euros for spectacular costumes, and stage sets of unparalleled dimensions.

The sound design team turned to Flux:: and the Spat Revolution Immersive Audio Engine, which is providing the main virtual room, a 5th order Ambisonic (HOA) soundscape to achieve smooth and precise crossover panning through different systems.

One of the important requirements that made Spat Revolution the obvious choice for this show, was to be able to transcode the Ambisonic mix to different channel based speaker arrangements, which is one of the important core features of the Spat Revolution.

’With adjusting the distances between all speaker positions we accomplished a very smooth panning for 360° without huge level drops’’ – States Jonas Gehrmann, 3D Audio consultant from Sphereo.

Another important task for this project, was to provide an additional immersive mix for the Wall Sky Lounge, a special VIP area with a 4.1 Channel based system, and the backstage mixes in stereo. Both these things are achieved with the Spat Revolution by simply down-mixing the original 5th order Ambisonic mix using different transcoders simultaneously.

At FOH on this project an Avid S6L 32D mixing system is used, feeding two Spat Revolution engine servers (Mac Pro) via MADI while Pro Tools is providing playback and automation using the Spat Send plugins.

The in-house classic system is comprised of a main LCR arrangement together with surround speakers. The original routing of this system was using single console auxes to single surround positions in order to pan sources manually in the house.

Since the house system is also used for guest productions, who need a traditional setup, and that neither space or budget allowed for a second immersive system, the actual current house system alone is used for the immersive integration. Mind the whole visual design of this spectacular show!

Composed of different loudspeaker brand and models, the system includes main hangs and delays from Turbosound (FLEX ARRAY) and Surround hangs with FLEX ARRAY and Meyer Sound M’elodie. The Surround speakers include Meyer Sound UPJ and finally Turbosound FLEX and Meyer Sound MM4 completed the system with fills.

Friedrichstadt-Palast Theater
https://www.palast.berlin/

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Did you ever wonder what the Spat Revolution Immersive Audio Engine advanced source parameters were all about? How some panning techniques avoid sweet spots for live concert and installation? Wondering how multiple room soundscape using different set of loudspeakers and delivering different output stream can be achieved? What to learn on how live theatrical show are using Spat Revolution?

A blog read by Hugo Larin, Business Development for Spat Revolution

If you already had a chance to explore Spat Revolution, you’ve rapidly realised that control options for source go much deeper than what you may have expected or have used before. To many parameters? Maybe as a first flight into Spat you’ll find but understanding the power of each of them may have you realise what other options are brought to the table

Spat Revolution provides a variety of source parameters which affects each of the different mono, stereo or multi-channel sources in the Room soundscape. The common position parameters (derived from the center ref. point) called radiation, includes azimuth (effectively the 360 degree pan ), the distance (the distance of the source) and the elevation (the + or – 90 degree elevation of the source ). These position parameters, known as polar coordinates, can also be managed using common cartesian coordinates parameters; X, Y and Z axis

Then there are three parameters affecting the sonic properties of the source and the entire Room quality. The Aperture, is the “sound cone” projected by the virtual source in the acoustic space (going from a default 80 degrees to a tighter opening at 10 degrees, or a full spread up to 360 degrees). You can also consider it as a ratio between direct sound and reverbered ones. Increasing the Aperture will ultimately diffuse it wider, excite more the room and then increase the reverb sensation. The orientation of the source is controlled by Yaw (the ability to turn the direction of the source 360 degrees, pointing it to another direction) and Pitch (pitching the source signal up or down + or – 90 degrees.

When dealing with multichannel sources or multiple simultaneously selected sources, the BARYCENTRIC (center of mass where the sources orbit) parameters allows the source group to rotate around the X, Y and Z center of mass. This give the soundscape designer some very rapid ways to work with multi-sources. You can also adjust the scale (distance from the center of mass) of the multi-channel or multi-selected source. The scale can be used to rapidly scale up many source distances in the soundscape provided.

In addition to this is the SPREAD FACTOR controlling the way the source will be spread out to the different speakers depending on the selected Room panning type. For example, when set at 0%, the source is spread only to the closest speakers. When set at 100%, the source is spread to all the speakers. So the source’s sound image will be located at the center of the speakers.

Figure 1: Spat Revolution Source Radiation, Position , Spreading and Barycentric

Perceptual Controls

Some controls are proposed which allows to specify the effect the source has in a room using perceptual terms, rather than the technical terms. This is derived from psychoacoustic research with Flux:: partners the IRCAM.
https://www.ircam.fr/recherche/equipes-recherche/eac/

The kind of source parameters we are talking about are; Presence (prominence of the direct sound with respect to the reverberated sound), Warmth (presence of the low frequency content part of the source) and Brilliance (presence of the high frequency content part of the source).

Further on we have the Room Presence (Prominence of the reverberation with respect to the source,), Running Reverberance (amount of perceived reverb when feeding a continuous music message, where the overall sound is a tight blend of the dry and wet signals and the reverb part cannot be mentally separated.), and the Envelopment (corresponds to the perceived notion of how much the listener is being surrounded by the ambient sound).

Now that we are touching on the reverb you may be interested to know that each room in SPAT have a reverb sound that can be enabled. For that matter of fact each sources in the room has an individual reverb on or off setting. Spat is not trying to simulate any specific venue room but giving the ability to create the reverb effect (artificial reverberation of sounds). The reverb parameters include Room size, Reverb Start or Decay, some perceptual factors and parameters on the room response controlling early reflection and the cluster.

Figure 2: Spat Revolution Perceptual and Reverb Controls

Multiple Rooms, Panning Techniques, Dealing with Speaker Setup for Live

How to plan a speaker design and how Spat deals with panning over these your multi-channel immersive system remains a popular conversation. Some manufacturers will propose sort of a standard stage setup where 5, 7 or more speaker hangs are spread across the stage with rather equal separation in distance between each hangs. This can indeed achieve some good panning with a fix technique over the front stage but reinforces the need to work within the framework proposed.

Spat is not trying to give a fix proposition, rather it proposes a variety of options, some as creativity tools, others as flexibility in speaker design and approach. It can obviously and easily organize an arrangement of 5, 7 or 9 array hang reproducing the front of the stage with equal spacing and nicely pan sources across with nice and smooth VBAP panning technique thus providing great localisation and distribution in this case. The Azimuth parameter will provide the panning degree and Distance will move the source front to back.

An important factor to introduce is that Spat comes with a concept of many what is called room. A room is basically a soundscape using either a predefined or custom channel based speaker arrangements (Predefined includes stereo, all the common surround, various 2D, cubes, Auro 3D, Atmos and DTS, etc) The custom arrangement is a speaker configuration containing all the speakers of your design or actually a portion of the speakers that you may want to use in a specific soundscape. The power of multi-rooms means that a mix of strategies and arrangements could be used with Spat. While a Room could take care of the 3, 5 7 or more front of stage hang using a VBAP panning strategies, a second Room could deal with other speakers for effects.

Now, on with panning techniques. The Spat engine offers a variety of spatialisation and panning techniques which may suit different applications (Binaural, High order Ambisonic HOA or 2D/3D Channels based with VPAB, DBAP, KNN, SPCAP and more panning types).

A very important point to understand when working with immersive audio is how some panning techniques are relative to a central listening position. Various panning techniques commonly exist (non-proprietary) and a manufacturer would typically pick one of those methods. VPAB and High Order Ambisonic room panning for example will typically require the listener to be positioned in a ‘’sweet spot’’ (although sweet spot size can be controlled in some case). This is clearly a challenge for concert, theatrical stage and installation where the audience can be all over the place.

Now we’ve talked about the fact that multiple techniques can actually be used simultaneously in Spat with these different Rooms allowing for different intentions, for different effects and requirements, in parallel (basically delivering multiple content at the same time). One room with some connected sources may be using a panning method with no assumptions on position of the listener, the central location (or speaker setup for that matter of fact). DBAP (Distance Based Amplitude panning) is actually one of those. Contrary to VBAP where a source will typically use 2 (or 3) speakers only to reproduce the virtual source (which will work only for a portion of the audience) DBAP will distribute signal. It is also possible to use KNN (amplitude panning based on the distance between the virtual source and the K-nearest speakers.) allowing the user to define the number of speakers a source will use.

A more sweet spot centric strategy, such as VBAP, could actually still be used in a live situation. An example of this can be in a big top for an all-around setup where speakers are spread around the audience. Panning a source around will have a very nice smooth effect of movement and localisation which may be desired when spinning something in the soundscape and vocal intelligently (and distribution in the audience) is not of any concern.

Delivering simultaneous output streams on different speaker arrangements may not be something you need to do in an everyday live setup, but what about if you want to deliver a binaural feed to the video capture of the show in order to deliver the immersive mix while you’re simultaneously delivering the signal to your speaker outputs? With Spat you could be recording; a binaural, a standard stereo, a 5.1/ 7.1 or any channel based configuration simultaneously in the same project and setup.

In creation phase or studio style scenario, delivering simultaneous output streams is the power of bouncing all formats at the same time of the same immersive mix. You could think as well at the sound designer delivering himself for preview a binaural output for headphones while on a plane, a surround speaker arrangement for his studio work, while actually creating the content for the multi speaker arrangements of the actual show itself, that may have speakers by the dozen!

Endless it is a very powerful creative feature. Allowing for e.g. to use a VBAP channel base room for very localized sound in addition to a first order Ambisonic ones for blurry sound etc…

Figure 3: All Speaker with a KNN Pannings

Figure 4: 5.1 Soundscape deliver to multi zones

Figure 5: Various different Speaker Arrangements and Panning Types used simultaneously in one and the same project

Interested in this conversation?

Read our next blog that covers how Spat deals with speaker alignment, the hardware resources to run Spat, the system latency and more specifically used in regards to Live Theatrical Shows.

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We welcome you all to come and meet Flux:: at the AES in New York this year, stop by for a nice cup of coffee and experience the Spat Revolution – Book your tickets now!

17 – 20 OCTOBER 2018 – BOOTH #402

http://www.aes.org/events/145/

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Flux:: will be represented by Media Integration at the AES 2018 International Conference on SPATIAL REPRODUCTION ‘Aesthetics and Science ‘, Tokyo, Japan – 2018, August 7th-9th.

All informations on Media integration Stand (Japan Only):

http://www.minet.jp/contents/event/aes-tokyo-2018/

All programs of the AES 2018:

http://www.aes.org/conferences/2018/spatial/program_paper/

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