Timewalk Exhibition Hides L-Acoustics L-ISA System In Immerse LDN

Timewalk, a large-scale immersive exhibition at Immerse LDN in London, is using a fully concealed L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal sound system to transport visitors through 12,000 years of human history. The installation, delivered by Turkish integrator and L-Acoustics Certified Provider Asimetrik for exhibition producer DEM Museums, combines multi-room projection mapping with object-based audio that surrounds guests without revealing any visible loudspeakers.

Immersive Journey through Human History

Opened in July at Immerse LDN, a dedicated immersive entertainment district on the ExCeL London waterfront at Royal Victoria Dock, Timewalk spans more than 1,600 square metres. The walkthrough experience takes guests from the ritual gathering grounds of Göbeklitepe through the hanging gardens of Babylon, the temples of ancient Egypt, the observatories of the Maya and the Moai of Rapa Nui.

Each historic setting occupies its own projection-mapped room with dedicated audio. DEM Museums, known for the Hagia Sophia History and Experience Museum and the Ephesus Experience Museum in Türkiye, uses L-ISA to position sound above, below and around visitors as they move through the five-chapter narrative.

Project Brief with Invisible Equipment Requirement

From the outset, DEM defined a content-led brief that focused on outcomes rather than hardware. The goal was for visitors to be unaware of the sound system itself. Every sonic element had to be locked to the projected visuals: birds overhead, water apparently underfoot, or voices moving fluidly across the space. Crucially, this illusion needed to hold for the entire standing audience in each room, not for a single listening position.

Asimetrik project engineering manager Buğra Kezan notes that the exhibition needed sound to be an integral, emotionally engaging layer of the storytelling, operating unattended and consistently every day throughout the show run. DEM’s measure of success was that the audio would carry the same emotional weight as the visuals while remaining effectively invisible.

Consultancy, System Evaluation and Technical Criteria

Having first introduced DEM to L-ISA during the Ephesus Experience Museum project in İzmir, which won Best Museum at the 2024 MONDO-DR Awards, Asimetrik again supported DEM for the London installation. The integrator’s initial recommendation was that DEM appoint an independent consultant to oversee both the system design and the sound content, ensuring decisions were driven by technical performance rather than supplier preference.

Multiple object-based and immersive audio platforms were evaluated for Timewalk. After comparative assessment, DEM returned to L-ISA, with cabinet dimensions, power efficiency and spatial rendering capabilities emerging as decisive factors.

Challenge Of Coverage, Intelligibility And Isolation

Unlike seated auditoria, Timewalk’s rooms host freely moving groups. There is no fixed sweet spot, so the spatial image needed to remain stable across the entire floor area. At the same time, each room operates banks of projectors that generate a constant broadband noise floor, forcing the audio design to maintain intelligibility in quiet scenes without resorting to disruptive loudness during more dramatic moments.

The five rooms run independent programme material on continuous cycles, demanding tight acoustic isolation to prevent sound bleed between zones as groups transition from one chapter to the next. This requirement drove both the loudspeaker layout and the construction of wall housings.

Architectural Constraint And Power Limitation

Architectural conditions in the venue added further complexity. Projection surfaces sit close to the walls, leaving no space to mount loudspeaker cabinets in front of them. As a result, every L-Acoustics enclosure is recessed into purpose-built housings within the walls themselves.

Those housings had to satisfy three competing criteria: preserve the loudspeaker’s response and directivity, maintain isolation between adjacent rooms running separate content, and avoid encroachment on the fire escape corridors immediately behind the walls. Corridor depth set a hard limit on enclosure depth that could not be exceeded.

Power availability was another fixed constraint. The building’s electrical infrastructure had to support a heavy projection load and the immersive sound system within a defined capacity, making energy efficiency an important design parameter.

Cabinet Dimension And Power Draw Influence System Selection

According to Asimetrik, it was these practical constraints that differentiated L-Acoustics in the final decision. Cabinet dimensions relative to the required sound pressure level allowed the recessed housings to remain within the permitted depth set by the escape corridors. In parallel, loudspeaker sensitivity and amplifier efficiency enabled the team to achieve the desired acoustic performance with a materially lower power draw compared with alternative options.

For DEM, this combination of compact physical footprint and efficient power usage constituted a clear technical advantage in a site where both space and power were heavily prescribed.

Room Layout Variation across Historical Chapter

No two Timewalk rooms share an identical audio layout. Göbeklitepe, the opening chapter, uses a 9.1 configuration built from three L-Acoustics X8i, six 5XT and two SB15m subwoofers.

Babylon, Ancient Egypt and the Maya each employ a full L-ISA 360° configuration including a floor-level layer, allowing sounds to emanate from beneath visitors as well as around them. Each of these rooms runs five X8i, six X6i and 11 5XT loudspeakers paralleled across three separate lines, supported by two SB18i subwoofers per room.

Rapa Nui, the final chapter, is the most technically demanding environment. It is the only space that combines both below-ear-level and overhead loudspeaker layers, enabling L-ISA to position sound genuinely above or below guests rather than solely in the horizontal plane. This room features five X8i, two A10i Wide, 29 X6i and three KS21i subwoofers. Three additional 5XT loudspeakers cover the connecting corridors between chapters.

System Infrastructure And L-ISA Workflow

In total, Timewalk operates 114 L-Acoustics loudspeakers and 11 subwoofers across five discrete zones. The system is driven by 15 L-Acoustics amplified controllers, including LA7.16i, LA4X and LA2Xi models, all running on Milan-AVB networked audio.

The final immersive mixes are created within the L-ISA Processor, then printed and delivered to the exhibition’s media servers. From there, the audio files are distributed over the network directly to the amplified controllers, streamlining the playback chain for reliability and day-to-day operation.

L-Acoustics application engineer Sergey Becker collaborated with the Asimetrik team on the final L-ISA calibration, while L-Acoustics sales manager Pavel Aheunin supported the project from its early design stages through to completion.

Permanent Audio Infrastructure For Rotating Experience

Feedback from DEM’s content team indicates that the immersive audio experience is achieving its intended impact. The exhibition’s in-house audio engineer rapidly adopted the L-ISA workflow, an important factor for a venue that needs to reproduce the show at a consistent quality level every morning.

Asimetrik designed the system with future productions at Immerse LDN in mind. Because the entertainment district regularly rotates its experiences, the L-ISA infrastructure is specified as a room asset rather than a show-specific build. New content can be authored against the existing loudspeaker layout and object-based rendering, typically requiring only a recalibration and a new show file.

This approach positions the immersive sound system as a reusable foundation for successive productions, with Timewalk demonstrating how concealed, object-based audio can anchor large-scale experiential storytelling without drawing attention to the underlying technology.