The demonstration titled “The Soundscape Experience” was held from 17th to 19th February with two sessions per day, at d&b’s Asia Pacific premises in Singapore. A mix of theatre practitioners, rental and staging companies, houses of worship personnel, performance venue technical professionals were among the mix of attendees over the three days.
The set-up for the demonstration included the Soundscape DS100 Signal Engine audio processor and d&b loudspeakers working in tandem with solutions from the collaboration partners for this demonstration, Avid’s Venue S6L console and BlackTrax trackers.
The demonstration was hosted by Regional Business Development Manager, Kheong Sen Lim, and Application Engineer, Gareth Kelbrick of d&b Asia Pacific. Rather than being an overly technical session it was more a hear and experience event.
Kheong briefed the audience about the d&b En-Scene and En-Space software modules that are part of the Soundscape experience. En-Scene is a sound object positioning tool allowing the individual placement and movement of up to 62 sound objects. Kheong demonstrated how the BlackTrax beacon that was attached to him worked when he walked from one side to the other with the audio output from the loudspeakers tracking his movements accordingly in real-time.
This was followed by a brief about Blacktrax and its capabilities by Malcolm Fooh, Product Specialist from Acoustic & Lighting System, who are the distributors of the Blacktrax solution. Malcolm also demonstrated how BlackTrax can not only track audio but also trigger lights to follow movements.
In the next demonstration, attendees experienced through recorded playback how En-Scene localised the position of each instrument creating a more immersive experience rather than the customary left/right setup imaging that we would experience in most venues.
With regards to En-Space. Kheong highlighted how this in-line room emulation tool helps to create and modify reverberation signatures for any space. The reverberation signatures are emulations derived from acoustic measurements of seven internationally renowned performance venues and convolved with the audio processor.
The Avid Venue S6L console played its role in the demonstration with the mix and processing of the audio. Shah Tahir, IMS Mahajak’s General Manager, highlighted that there is plugin within the console that communicates via Dante with the d&b DS100. IMS Mahajak is the official distributor of the Avid consoles in Singapore.