Since creating Airsound Spatial, a question that has come up fairly regularly is… does it scale? Whilst we know it works great in a control room or for entertainment playback in a smaller room, can it be used to deliver spatial audio on a bigger scale? With the kind cooperation of the Distillery II in Bristol, we have been able to do an experiment, to discover how Airsound Spatial works with some serious PA equipment delivering it.
We went in with the intention of mocking up a system and developing software to evaluate how it would work. Spoiler: The results were so good that the studio owner immediately asked us to do a permanent installation, making this a highly versatile spatial audio venue with incredible acoustic performance in terms of fidelity and sheer volume!
Follow up video to come from the finished result. See the Distillery II studio: https://distillermusic.com/studio
The system
For the permanent upgrade, we will be adding 6 Martin Audio DD8 Live units. These feature fantastic frequency response and high SPL whilst being highly compact. They also have a Dante input which allows for remote routing, programming of filters and precise time alignment. Give them power and a network cable, and you’re done.
These speakers are positioned to produce the required information and spatial steering sound waves. A special version of our ASAP software (Airsound Spatial Audio Processor) is used to map the required sound format (e.g. 7.1.4) to the physical speakers.