Is it possible to "rotate" outputs to two sets of speakers, so that 1R and 2R become AL and AR, and 1L/2L become BL/BR respectively?

Question

Hopefully the title makes some amount of sense, and the actual description adds context. Feel free to suggest edits or request clarification.

Here's my situation: I'm designing sound for a theatre, and they've got two sets of speakers, which I'll call Front/F and Back/B. Front is in the front of the audience, Back is in the back, we have a nice surround-sound thing going on. Here's a top-down diagram of the setup, with the arrows showing where the audience is facing and where I'm sitting:

FL	[stage]	FR
^^^	^^^	^^^
BL		BR
	(me)

For the latest show they've rotated the setup 90° so the stage is on the east wall and the audience is now facing what would normally be house right. So, to orient the surround sound correctly, I need to "rotate" the outputs 90° as well. The speaker that was Front Right needs to become the left output of the east "set" of speakers ("EL"), and the former Back Right needs to become the "East Right"), and so on for the west side of the stage as well.

Here's a diagram of the current setup and the changes I would like to make:

FL (now "WL")	>	FR (now "EL")
	>	[stage]
BL (now "WR")	>	BR (now "ER")
	(me)

I think I could bodge this by doing some convoluted rendering, e.g. something like this:

• Motorcycle needs to drive past the stage from L to R. In this setup, that means it'll go along the East wall, from North to South.
• Create a "motorcycle driving past" track normally, going from R to L
• Render R/L channels separately to stereo tracks "1" and "2" respectively
• Flip the panning of track 1, so now it's only playing out of the R channel
• Output track 1 to the front speakers and 2 to the back, and play them simultaneously
• The panning now starts in FR and then goes to BR, which is basically the same as starting in EL and panning to ER.

This is kinda convoluted and time-consuming, so I'm looking for some clever alternative using software/output manipulation. From my cue software and tracks' perspective, I'd like to just use "Front L/R" and "Back L/R" as usual (i.e. if the solution could be agnostic to the actual tracks and cue software, so I can just treat them like FL/R and BL/R as usual, that's ideal.)

I'm using QLab to run the sound and Reaper to edit the tracks beforehand, but I have access to a few other DAWs.

Answer 1

To me it seems like the easies solution would be to reconnect the amplifiers to mirror the new setup. Probably easiest to do in the connection between preamplifier and power amplifier. Be sure to label everything so you easily can reconnect.

Another alternative is to import the four channel sound into an application that allows you to reassign channels. You would still mix Left/Right but the resulting four channel mix would have Left Front on another channel than 1. (I tend to use Blackmagic Davinci Resolve more and more for audio. It has a lot of very well thought out functions, but can a bit confusing at first. Not sure if it does four channels the way you want to, but worth a check. The, quite comprehensive, free version should be sufficient.)