Lightroom, London
A creative collaboration

A 26m x 18m cuboid room with 11m high concrete walls is an inhospitable environment for sound. Due to the surface finishes within Lightroom the space has a reverberation time of 6 seconds. With a conventional audio solution this would result in poor speech intelligibility and lack of musical clarity.Installed by HOLOPLOT partner Creative Technology, the sound system consists of two X1 Matrix Arrays at either end of the room. Each array consists of 4 X1 Modul 96s and 4 X1 Modul 80-S, embedded and entirely hidden within wall cavities, making for an unspoiled 360 degree projection surface.The acoustic centre of the East Array is at 4.61m and for the West Array at 6.66m. These were the only possible positions to create wall cavities for the arrays and were predefined and not possible to change. A traditional audio solution would struggle to provide intelligible audio with sources facing each other, due to phase issues and spill between sources.

Thanks to unique HOLOPLOT optimisation algorithms the listening area can be defined as well as the relative sound pressure level for each area. The reflective, concrete surfaces are avoided, resulting in high fidelity audio and uniform coverage from each array, no matter where the listener is positioned within the space.

The positions of the Virtual Sources are defined inside HOLOPLOT Plan, HOLOPLOT’s sound system design software allowing sound designers to visualize the impact of X1’s unique capabilities on any given space.

‘Bundled’ waves are reflected from the wall as if there is a point source speaker positioned there, allowing the listener to localize the sound from a position where there is no array. It is key for Lightroom that visitors can localize sound from these reflections no matter where they are within the main space. To achieve this, multiple reflections are distributed along the North and South walls of the venue.