11 QUESTIONS With Dave Haydon
- Director Co-Owner, Out Board & TiMax Spatial Audio
Dave Haydon, Director Co-Owner, Out Board & TiMax Spatial Audio
As the co-owner and director of Out Board, one of the leading innovation companies in
entertainment, presentation, and experience technologies, Dave Haydon also relaunched the TiMax
Spatial Audio division in 2000 with his business partner Robin Whittaker. Today, TiMax's
products are revolutionizing the field of immersive audio at every step of the way. In an
exclusive interview with PALM + AV-ICN, Dave Haydon reveals the reason behind foraying into the
world of spatial audio, the core technology that makes TiMax's products a cut above the rest,
and how he envisions the trajectory for spatial audio in the Indian pro audio market.
1. You co-founded the current outboard in 2000. Since the last 23 years or so, you have been
a witness to how this cutting-edge technology - immersive spatial audio - has been evolving.
What in the first place motivated you to start the whole journey?
Outboard existed before 2000. I and my current business partner (joint CEOs) relaunched the company
in 2000, but there was a history of it just before that creating an earlier version of TiMax. At
that point in time, there were no commonly used terms like immersive audio and spatial audio. I had
worked for BSS Audio / Harman in signal processing and previously in the mixing console business -
Midas and Solid State Logic, in the live sound, theatre, studio and broadcast markets. When
everything became digital and a whole series of new generic processers evolved, as are now very
common, where you are assembling and hooking up virtual versions of all the boxes I'd previously
been developing and selling in hardware form, for me it felt in a way just more of the same stuff
and not so interesting.
So after 12 years at BSS Audio / Harman, I was interested to get into something new and noticed what
my now business partner was then starting to do with TiMax. It was just a case of getting into
something a bit more pioneering, bit newer.
2. Out Board was initially more about rigging and trussing as well as electrical power
controls to a large extent. What made you foray into spatial audio?
Rigging control is a significant part of our business, actually. It is a very simple technology
compared to the TiMax. It came originally out of making power distribution systems in the early
days, very important but fairly unexciting stuff. From some early custom designs, we then developed
since 2000 several standard lines of chain-hoist rigging controllers which you now see everywhere in
the rigging industry who need reliability and consistency for staging, lighting, sound, video,
scenery etc. Alongside this, electrical safety testing systems are also a section of our business,
serving the same markets, and still growing. But audio is our first love and predominantly of course
pioneering spatial audio.
3. With spatial audio, what has been some of the major milestones for TiMax in terms of
application?
When it comes to TiMax spatial audio, one of the things where it first broke boundaries, I suppose,
was in the Royal Albert Hall opera productions. It's a big circular building in London, very
impressive, but being circular and with a dome, it could be a sound engineer's nightmare. In fact,
acoustically, they've hung lots of mushroom structures in the ceiling to stop the sound going to and
from the dome.
In the old days, they often used to treat the space like a sports arena, with a centre-cluster
design. There'd be a big speaker system hung in the middle, and they'd hope not to get too much back
off the building. But inevitably it sounds like it's coming from the roof, not ideal for premium
opera shows staged in-the-round with audience all around.
This is where strategic delay management comes in. With cross-stage distances of 30 meters, you've
got time differences of 90 milliseconds. So we replaced the centre-cluster design with an "exploded
cluster" concept, with multiple drops of speakers like Meyer or d&b hung further out and nearer to
the audience. Then we timed these to all the areas on-stage and added front-fills to help pull the
sound down and localise to the performers. This approach needed a device that could have different
timings for every speaker from every mic on the stage. So the delay-matrix, the key element of the
TiMax spatial processing, was the answer. It just revolutionized the sound of the show, as it has
many others since in London, Broadway and venues worldwide.
At the same time, corporations were doing lavish product launches and conferences requiring
something a bit more exciting than just mono or stereo audio. So they started looking at surround
sound formats, such as 5.1, which was very limited in terms of multiple sources and live
presentation into large and variable-shaped spaces. TiMax software offered a screen where you could
drag blobs on the screen to position or move sound. This is what became known as object-based mixing
many years later, such as what Dolby Atmos is today. TiMax allowed the user to place and move sound
between dozens of speakers rather than just five or eight channels.
4. Did TiMax Spatial Audio initially encounter any resistance or reluctance from within the
audio industry?
About 20 years ago, when the original TiMax weighed around 40 pounds, producers would look at it and
say, 'Speakers, I understand that. Microphones, I understand that. That mixing desk, I don't really
understand that, but I see a lot of them about, so we need to invest in it. But what is this
delay-matrix thing?"
Apart from a few enlightened sound designers, some would regard this as less important. There was
also a battle of the budgets, and often show designers wanted to see fewer speakers, and then there
was the time needed to take measurements and set up these delays in the matrix software. There was
some resistance at first from within the industry, except for very forward-thinking people who
really went for it and consequently created much more advanced operas and theatre shows.
5. In terms of research and development, what was the roadmap like for TiMax's
products?
In the speaker industry, stereo line-array was the king for a period. So to some extent we were
working against that. However, we were also doing Broadway shows for Disney and other major
producers, with more sound designers starting using those same products from the speaker industry in
the multichannel configurations we were suggesting.
TiMax's original Classic version from more than a decade ago was still a bit expensive and limited.
We also couldn't get the chips anymore, so we developed a smaller, newer version, at lower
price-points, double the number of channels, a lot more functions, including 64-tracks of playback,
equalization, system and source group control, snapshots, cueing and showcontrol - and of course
with what had now become known as object-based spatial mixing, with instant auto-rendering of
multiple spatial layers. This was TiMax SoundHub, and suddenly the economics made more sense to more
people, applications and budgets.
We didn't stop there, because up to about five years ago, we had limitations in the memory and
performance of the DSP chip in TiMax. We would struggle with long delays in very big spaces and had
to allocate memory in a limited way. So we got into an FPGA platform and it gave us the ability to
also completely redesign the delay-morphing algorithms, the special bit that makes the panning sound
cleaner and better than before, and also to add more delay memory to easily handle arenas and
stadiums without any compromise.
This helped us meet demand across more pro-audio markets; TiMax now came in at lower entry-level and
overall price-points . The other thing the FPGA allows us to do, which is quite recent, is to allow
user-selection in the software between 48k to 96k, which can be an important investment criteria for
clients seeking state-of-the-art technology.
6. Can you tell us a little bit more about the 96k audio technology?
There are two places where 96k audio is evident - one is in the core processing and there it's all
about resolution, the other is in interfacing to the outside world, plugging it into sound systems
and mixing consoles.
Some people don't care about switching to 96k, and they stick to 48k because the rest of the system
is. But it's old-fashioned to only offer 48k, so with TiMax you can now choose. We have two Dante
card options, so we can now do 32 or 64 channels up to 96k. The 96k selection in TiMax is free of
charge to anybody who's purchased or upgraded to the FPGA.
We are great believers in sustainability - we can take a 10-year-old TiMax, upgrade it to FPGA for
some money less a loyalty rebate for the old dsp cards, and then you have a free 96k upgrade if you
want. You'd need our 96k Dante card, just a little extra money, to get into the outside world, but
this helps future-proof even a relatively long-ago TiMax purchase.
7. Can you elaborate a bit more about the core technology behind the TiMax SoundHub and the
TiMax TrackerD4?
The algorithms that run inside TiMax are quite important and are what we might call holistic. They
listen to the audio signal, and decide on a sample-by-sample basis, based on spectral and dynamic
content, which one of several morphing algorithms to use. In real time it figures out, based on the
signal that's going through, how it's going to manipulate the imaging delays for the most seamless
and transparent outcome. That's a unique part of the TiMax platform. Then it's the software. We've
always focused heavily on the workflow to make it task-based rather than function-based, so the
sound designer thinks in terms of spatial objectives rather than how the system is achieving them.
However, compared to other spatial processors, what TiMax offers is full visibility and agency over
all processing. You can open up another screen and see all the numbers. This can prove very useful,
because for example, if the user moves the sound around and something's not right but the algorithm
behind the screen doesn't tell them what it's doing, the user may struggle to deal with the issue.
So although the TiMax workflow is intuitively and efficiently task-based, the added visibility and
agency is second to none.
With our second-generation TiMax TrackerD4, we built on our original tracking system that was the
first in the market in 2008. We'd learnt that the industry needed a tracking system with a better
entry-level price and even higher performance. So our OEM core UWB technology supplier partners made
it work and we launched the current highly-successful TrackerD4 about 5-6 years ago with both those
major benefits, and more to come.
8. TiMax SoundHub and TiMax TrackerD4 are widely used in both enclosed spaces and open-air
spaces. How is their application different for these spaces?
It depends on the show. In terms of performance, we've covered arena-scale things indoors. We have
done a lot of theatre, be it conventional theatre or in-the-round theatre. Outdoors, we've covered
areas the size of an entire stadium. Sometimes, we have speakers all around and we are timing and
localising from 50 meters to 100+ meters. There, our most effective tracking systems have 16, 20, or
even 24 sensors. There our inherent tracking redundancy plays a very important role as half the
sensors can't see many of the performers. In a conventional theatre, most of the time, you will be
seen a bit by most of the sensors, but there'll be blocking when people get in the way and turn
away, but luckily only two sensors need to see you for you to be tracked. Those big venues were also
restrictive for TiMax SoundHub before we had the FPGA, but now it easily handles very large stadiums
too.
We do a huge opera show regularly in Austria in a Roman quarry. At 80 meters wide and 20 meters
deep, it's the biggest open-air stage in Europe. The speakers are all built into the set and painted
over, so they are invisible and also not placed in exact regimented locations - the unique
flexibility of TiMax allows it to compensate for this. Our specialization also comes into play when
the scenery and speakers actually move during the show, so certain delay configurations have to
change as the set moves; TiMax is designed to manage that as well. You may not have these sort of
shows every day, but, especially in some outdoor applications, there are often extra challenges due
to the scale and design of the shows, and you need something a bit clever to make it work.
In a lot of corporate events in convention centres - for instance, car launches, we don't get to put
speakers in a neat row like some spatial systems demand. We need to deploy them in a discreet
manner. With TiMax, we can instantly calculate around that, both indoors and outdoors, albeit within
certain obvious laws-of-physics boundaries.
9. What key trends do you see emerging in spatial audio in 2023?
Definitely a lot more what you might call rock shows, such as a tour we did with Tool. They built a
separate 3D effects system - with TiMax creating like a cocoon of sound, blending many effects and
instruments and a lot of electronic stuff from stage into that system. Lately, there have been a lot
more conventional touring productions using spatial audio.
Spatial audio continues to diversify in corporate events, what we call the presentation market.
These spaces want to have a bit more than just simple speaker systems. Interestingly, there are also
presentation suites emerging at major corporations in their actual HQ buildings as well as these
temporary systems for launch or conference events.
One recent site even included audience mics into the TiMax spatialisation. When someone from the
audience has a question, rather than personally handing them a microphone, they put a tracker and
mic into a spongey Catchbox and throw it around. This means wherever the person is in the audience
their voice gets automatically localised. Creating a kind of specialized corporate presentation
space is something that we anticipate seeing more of.
Even with applications such as VR, XR, and AR, there's a little bit of a drift towards moving
outside of headphones and moving into a multichannel speaker environment. We haven't sold a lot in
that area yet but there's some development work going on with associates.
10. How do you see that trajectory of spatial audio evolving in India? What role does Alphatec
play in this?
I'm getting an impression spatial audio is going to get quite big here, very quickly. We signed up
with Alphatec just before Covid as they offer us experienced full-service distribution, integration,
and support for TiMax across multiple regions in India. This is a very serious company, I believe,
for us to be engaging with just at the right time. When there's an appetite for something in a
market, it's important that the passion and capabilities are matched to the same degree to
capitalise on it.
In India, for spatial audio, there weren't previously so many conventional theatre spaces. However,
as well as the usual festivals, they seem to be now building contemporary venues and full-size
theatres; I hadn't heard of that 5 to 10 years ago.
And I think that it is going to get very big from here. So in my opinion, it's very good timing for
the market and also for us to have found the right people to do it with.
11. What has been the Indian pro audio market's response so far to TiMax's products?
We haven't done any tracking systems here yet. But when it comes to the TiMax SoundHub spatial audio
platform, I think the performing arts in this country are exploding and probably the experience
market as well, which means the Indian pro audio market will witness a surge in such projects where
TiMax will ultimately prove to be quite quintessential.