The system was specified by award-winning sound designer, Thomas Strebel of audiopool, Switzerland, for inclusion on the bizarre tour of musical comedy, Die Patienten by leading Swiss comic, Marco Rima. Strebel is well versed in producing clear and source oriented sound reinforcement for performances of vast proportions and also in the round, so he and his team were perfectly at home amongst the tour madness.
Die Patienten is the story of the members of a mental care institution who form a rock band but need to escape their current closed environment to fulfil their destiny and prove themselves by winning the band competition. The crazy story line is matched with high energy, highly choreographed, on-stage rock performances in each of the seven tour locations.
Up to 10 principal actors and chorus members wore miniature TT Tags which allowed their locations on stage to be continuously tracked by the three TT sensors; two mounted proscenium left and right, pointing back and across the stage, with a rear centre-positioned TT Sensor pointing forward.
The TiMax2 SoundHub then converted this information into seamless delay-matrix changes in the vocal PA to achieve the corresponding vocal localisations in real-time.
TiMax2 SoundHub R16 received the headset radio-mic feeds and band mix via MADI from a Digico SD8 console, with the TiMax outputs going direct to d&b D12 amplifiers to drive the vocal and music systems. TiMax provided all system routing, level-profiling and EQ as well as the delay-matrix vocal localisation controlled by TiMax Tracker.
Three d&b Q7 speakers mounted on an upstage truss at left, centre, right positions provided for the dual purposes of performers' foldback and to act as first wavefront references to anchor the vocal PA's TiMax imaging delays.
The main vocal PA, which comprised two channels of d&b Q1 array, was flown from front truss at mid-left and mid-right positions. Four d&b E3 enclosures mounted under the front lip of the stage supplemented front-fill.
A separate music system - flown d&b Q1 line array system with ground stacked subs left and right - served the live rock band and playback.
Audiopool's soundmix crew on-site were Felix Hohl and Laurenz Zshokke on the DiGiCo SD8, with TiMax at FOH. Mixing the monitoring on the Yamaha LS9 were Lukas Neuenschwander and Ronan Huber.
Strebel stresses, "A tour like Die Patienten will always benefit from the addition of TiMax2 Soundhub and Tracker System. The performance is very high energy and the tracking system really helps to automatically keep up with what is going on where."
(Jim Evans)
