Sphere Executives Detail New Immersive Audio System For Las Vegas Venue

Executives from the Sphere Entertainment Co. — the entity behind the forthcoming new event space opening soon in Las Vegas — have unveiled its new Sphere Immersive Sound system, created in tandem with Berlin-based audio company Holoplot. The system will appear this fall as a key production component of the company’s new Sphere venue in Las Vegas, which opens Sept. 29 with its 25-date U2 residency.

Executives involved with the project, including James Dolan (executive chairman/CEO, Madison Square Garden Corp. and Sphere Entertainment Co.), David Dibble (CEO, MSG Ventures) and Roman Sick (CEO, Holoplot), demonstrated the audio system on site in Las Vegas for a small group of reporters on Thursday (July 20).

“I don’t care if you’ve seen U2 100 times,” Dolan remarked before an associate pressed play on recordings including the Irish band’s recent reimagining of its 1984 classic “Pride (In The Name Of Love).” “You’ve never seen and experienced this.”

For the Sphere team, Sphere Immersive Sound is the cornerstone — along with its 160,000-square-foot LED display plane, which remained off during Thursday’s demonstration — of its new 20,000-capacity venue, located near the Las Vegas Strip next to The Venetian. And, somewhat surprisingly, Sphere partnered with Holoplot for the project, rather than a more established player in the pro audio space.

According to Dibble, Sphere executives learned of the German company, founded in 2011, through its work outside of live entertainment: In December 2016, the startup deployed its patented 3D Audio-Beamforming technology in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, Germany’s largest train station, to send multiple messages at the same frequency simultaneously to different parts of the facility.

Applied in a concert venue, this technology can ensure that listeners, regardless of location, hear identical mixes at identical volumes. Holoplot’s technology also harnesses algorithmic machine learning and environmental data collected in real-time by sensors throughout Sphere to further refine and standardize the sound ultimately heard by attendees.

Sphere developed Sphere Immersive Sound to perfect audio for the venue’s specific acoustic space. “You’ll notice very few right angles here,” said Dibble, noting that for Sphere’s intimate, amphitheater-style seating, the company read from “the playbook from the ancient Greeks.” The seating format is key to Sphere’s appeal, but also created a monumental challenge. “How can we tackle acoustics in arguably the biggest nightmare seating format in live entertainment?” Dibble recalled the team wondering at the outset of the project.

That starts with approximately 1,600 permanently installed audio modules and 167,000 individually amplified speaker drivers, comprising hundreds of Holoplot’s X1 Matrix arrays, spread behind Sphere’s sprawling LED screen. As its name suggests, the X1 Matrix arrays combine the functionalities of vertical and horizontal line arrays, allowing users more control over where sound goes in a venue.

Like much of the Sphere project, audio design wasn’t conceived in a vacuum; an inevitable challenge of placing so much high-end audio equipment behind a state-of-the-art screen was ensuring the sounds produced wouldn’t distort visuals as they passed through the LED to listeners. The team wanted to “make the LED screen acoustically invisible,” Sick explained, hence the high number of small drivers spread across the screen’s large area, each producing a relatively small amount of audio to avoid disrupting Sphere’s video components.

That type of engineering trickery extends to the venue itself, including the seemingly-unremarkable black material covering every seat, which Dibble said has “the same audio-reflective value as human skin.” Acoustically, Sphere’s seats behave similarly regardless of whether they’re occupied by a body, which is further guaranteed by their perforated undersides.

For artists like U2, Sphere’s audio capabilities are nothing short of revelatory.

“The beauty of Sphere is not only the groundbreaking technology that will make it so unique, with the world’s most advanced audio system integrated into a structure which is designed with sound quality as a priority; it’s also the possibilities around immersive experiences in real and imaginary landscapes,” The Edge said in a statement. “In short, it’s a canvas of an unparalleled scale and image resolution, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

And according to Dibble, Sphere’s tools are also “intuitive, straightforward and, dare I say, easy.” The executive touted the notion of a “show on a stick,” where artists playing Sphere could effectively give the facility’s staff a thumb drive with specifics for their concerts and be up and running within minutes; sound engineers will even be able to bring in their own boards to interface with the system. It’s “not a heavy lift,” Dibble added.

But Sphere Immersive Audio’s richly detailed output also isn’t for the faint of heart. “Some artists will find it daunting,” Dolan said. “If you sing the wrong note, everyone’s gonna hear it.”

While Sphere Immersive Audio has been customized and scaled for the Las Vegas venue, some artists have already used a version of the technology while performing at another venue in MSG’s portfolio, New York’s 2,600-capacity Beacon Theatre, which introduced it in August 2022 during a pair of solo concerts by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio.

Dibble expects MSG to implement the technology across its portfolio of venues, including its namesake arena — though, he concluded, “Let’s get this open first.”