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TiMax tracks twenty mobile performers in Paraorchestra’s “The Nature of Why” in Hong Kong

The UK’s Paraorchestra brought “The Nature of Why” to Hong Kong’s No Limits Festival in March 2026, as a celebration of unconventional concert touring. Up to 250 audience members shared a 15-metre circular space with around twenty musicians, singers, and dancers, most almost constantly on the move. To track every performer in real time and give the audience precise directional information, front-of-house engineer Simon Honywill deployed TiMax SoundHub with TiMaxTrackerD4.

Founded by conductor Charles Hazelwood in 2011, Paraorchestra creates professional opportunities for disabled musicians. Breaking boundaries in every sense, the staging of “The Nature of Why” in earlier iterations highlighted an audio problem Honywill had struggled to solve. Honywill’s experiments to create an “acoustic bubble” around the performance lacked the precision he was looking for but most importantly, the performers struggled to hear themselves clearly through a monitoring system that doubled as the PA. Therefore, Honywill turned to the TiMax immersive sound solution.

The system installed for the five performances at the Kwai Tsing Theatre in Kowloon was built around real-time performer tracking. Six TiMax Tracker D4 sensors mounted overhead triangulated the live positions of performers and instruments, feeding TiMax SoundHub, which in turn, drove a ring of seven Martin Audio FlexPoint FP12 loudspeakers at a height of 2.5 metres, augmented by a Martin Audio SXCF118 cardioid subwoofer. Around twenty mobile sound sources were fitted with trackers, some performers wearing multiple units; the wheeled marimba alone required three.

Honywill accurately represented the audio performance in the space through an object-based mix. DPA microphones were routed individually to TiMax via Dante, bypassing conventional subgroup mixing entirely. It is this direct, per-source routing that enabled the spatial precision the piece required. “Using a system like TiMax, every source has its own unique amplitude and phase relationship to the sound system”, notes Honywill.

The seven Martin Audio FP12 loudspeakers formed a reinforcement ring around the performance area, allowing TiMax to generate a unique Image Definition - a bespoke set of per-cabinet level and delay values that placed every source precisely in space - for each performer in real time. The SXCF118 sub added low-frequency energy while its cardioid pattern reduced rearward radiation, preserving the clean spatial image inside the circle.

The full audio equipment package was supplied by Martin Audio’s APAC sales agency Generation AV, whose technical manager Jeremiah Joseph also joined the production team as both system tech and TiMax engineer.

(Photos: TiMax)

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