Cardiff, Wales, UK (December 3, 2025)—CULTVR’s Theatre Dome, the U.K.’s first immersive arts center, has installed a new 360-degree d&b Soundscape system.
Since opening in 2019, CULTVR, which is also Europe’s first “cross-disciplinary lab,” has positioned Cardiff, Wales as a key destination for XR (Extended Reality) and the immersive possibilities of live performance. CULTVR’s Theatre Dome auditorium offers a high-end, immersive AV infrastructure beneath a 12m (39 foot) concave projection surface. As well as presenting shows and experiences, the Dome is also a key part of CULTVR’s ongoing R&D into immersive arts.
The new system was specified and installed by d&b partner Southby Productions, which first worked with CULTVR in 2023 when the company, with d&b audiotechnik, supported an immersive show for Welsh band, Das Koolies, using d&b Soundscape. “We had an amazing time working with the team at CULTVR,” says Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Southby’s head of immersive, “and we knew it would benefit tremendously from a more permanent Soundscape solution to its audio.”
Designed by Holloway-Nahum, CULTVR’s Soundscape system uses a ring of 16 d&b 5S compact point source loudspeakers driven by 5D amplifiers. The DS100 signal processor provides the level and delay settings to each speaker necessary to create Soundscape’s signature naturalistic and “true” sound. In addition, four E15X-SUB compact subwoofers may be used as part of the Soundscape system or as a conventional sub array for CULTVR’s more traditional performance-based events.
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The design was not straightforward, as Holloway-Nahum explains. “The biggest difficulty was that the dome reaches quite low down, so we had to be careful not to place speakers in positions that blocked, or cast shadows from, the projectors.”
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Another obstacle was that the dome is too thick for speakers to be placed behind it. As a result, the ring had to be set relatively low, at just 2.55m (8.4 ft.) presenting challenges in covering each audience member with more than one speaker. “To address this,” Holloway-Nahum says, “we made a change to the initial system design, from the E8—which has 90-degree rotatable dispersion—to the 5S, with its 100-degree conical dispersion. We also worked with the team there to achieve every last centimeter of height that we could.”
