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TiMax Moves Matter in O2
Situated in London's O2 Arena, Matter - the latest club spin off from the hugely successful Fabric brand - has opened its South-East-London-facing doors on a vast 3000-capacity space. The technical specification within has affirmed Matter as the UK's first higher-tech superclub - and central to the system is a 16-channel TiMax audio delay matrix, which controls every channel of the main Room One sound system, including the subwoofers and the Bodysonic vibrating floor. Matter's sound and lighting design consultant, Dave Parry, confirms: "Before we even knew how the final system would work together, TiMax was always going to be integrated into it whatever we did!"
Matter is designed around the Kandinsky principle: vibration, lighting and music all coming together as a whole to provoke a trance-like state. Parry explains: "The whole lot - lighting, video and sound - moves as an integrated whole so as a very basic example, say the club is lit blue, I can take a red from one end of the room, all the way through the bar area LED lighting, through the video projectors and moving heads, to the dance floor, and then as the colour and projections move around there, the sound system will move with it - thanks to the TiMax. The TiMax also controls the Bodysonic floor and the sound from the subs, it's all linked together to create a totally immersive experience."
The main room system controlled by the TiMax delay matrix is comprised of single left and right hangs of Martin Audio W8L with W8LD as downfill and a small central hang of W8LM. Six Martin Audio H3s are spaced around the periphery of the dancefloor, just below the first floor balcony, and eight WS218 subwoofers are centrally arrayed in a single block under the stagefront.
As the TiMax controls the sound system, so an Avolites Diamond 4 desk exerts total control over each element of the technological mix - triggering the TiMax and the video projection via midi, and the LED lighting and moving heads via DMX.
Parry explains: "We've pre-programmed a series of chases that can be set off at the press of a button to augment the music. They each incorporate all the technologies, but from a TiMax perspective we can move sound around the loudspeaker channels, or we could just split the sound system up and send different elements to any channel or any combination of them: voices or random noises creating the effect of apparently-localised sound sources. For the future we are working on a full-range Bodysonic floor so we could get voices coming from the floor. We could also make special umbrella effects that create soundscapes from above.
"We've committed to working one-on-one with just a couple of the UK's greatest DJs, who want to dedicate time to working closely with the system: bringing in laptops and breaking down the music into its component parts, pulling bits out of the mix to reposition in the space and co-ordinate lighting with it through the Avolites' desk. There's also an Oxygen8 MIDI keyboard in the booth to allow realtime triggering of audio and lighting events as an integral part of the DJ's set.
"So, there'll be a real mix of integrated performance-related stuff on the fly and then there's the potential for pre-programmed material-specific set pieces that will be totally individual to a set played at Matter. This is no ordinary clubbing experience!"
In picture: Dave Parry with Dave Haydon of Out Board.
30th September 2008
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