Las Vegas, NV (December 4, 2023)—The U2 organization thrives on innovation in all things, especially when in front of a crowd. Creative director Willie Williams, with the band since 1982’s War Tour, has long pushed the envelope with his imaginative staging—just look at the claw-like structure of 2009’s in-the-round U2 360•Tour; the golden arch and lemon mirrorball of the 1997 PopMart Tour; the wall of video and flying Trabant cars of the 1992 Zoo TV Tour.
For FOH engineer Joe O’Herlihy, the sonic challenges presented by any stage design are water off a duck’s back. So when U2 signed up to open Sphere in Las Vegas, it was just another day at the office for the man who has been at front-of-house with the band ever since they played the Arcadia Ballroom in Cork, Ireland, where he worked, in 1978, when they were still teenagers.
The latest venture from the MSG organization, Sphere was designed from the get-go to be mind-blowing. Clad inside and out with acres of very-high-resolution LED screens, the huge orb-like structure features a high-tech, DSP-driven sound system of 1,600 speaker cabinets arrayed above, behind and around the audience, anchored by a proscenium array of more than 450 speakers.
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Where better to build such a venue than Las Vegas? And who better than U2, with its history of boundary-pushing stage shows, to make the most of the new venue’s groundbreaking tech? Plus, the timing was perfect. U2 kicked off its 25-show residency, titled U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, on September 29, nearly 47 years to the day after Larry Mullen Jr.’s ad on a school notice board brought him together with Bono, the Edge and Adam Clayton for the first time on September 25, 1976.
You might think that mixing U2 so many years later, now on a much larger stage sitting just a few feet in front of one-quarter of Sphere’s installed speaker arrays, would be daunting even for O’Herlihy, but he’s been there and done that. In fact, he says, “I’ve been doing that for 30 years with this band in front of some of the biggest sound systems in the world. We’ve made it work. We’ve always looked to the future. We evaluate to see if they are some things that we can take to another level that hasn’t been done before.”
Key to O’Herlihy’s sound design for U2’s Sphere show was that proscenium array of 464 Holoplot X1 modules behind the LED screen. “That’s the rock and roll, where the band is,” he explains. “That’s where you need to kick ass and where it has to sound fantastic.”
A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL PROSCENIUM
O’Herlihy’s sound design allocates three groups of modules on the Sphere proscenium system’s house-left vertical array, designated 1, 2 and 3, and three at house-right (12, 13, 14), for localized effects for the general-admission floor audience. Paired left/right groups of arrays across the proscenium arch, 25 or 30 feet above the stage, are reserved for the individual band members according to their positions on the stage: The Edge, stage-right, is fed to 4 and 5; Bono, generally to his left, to 6 and 7; drummer Bram van den Berg, sitting in for a recuperating post-surgery Larry Mullen, Jr., to 8 and 9; and bass player Adam Clayton, stageleft, to 10 and 11.
“It’s pictorial audio—where you see the musician, you hear the musician,” O’Herlihy explains, noting that he used a similar design during 2015’s Innocence + Experience Tour. In that instance, he recalls, he paired the line arrays flown above the arena-length stage thrust on which U2 performed part of the show, anchoring each stereo image at audience ear level using time-aligned front-fills.
During production rehearsals at Sphere prior to opening night, it became apparent that the difference in arrival times between the drums—the only onstage sound source apart from the vocals—and the proscenium arrays to the standing audience was going to be a problem. Veteran producer Steve Lillywhite, who consulted on the Sphere show, at one point found himself in front of the stage and observed, “In what we call Act Two, where they do ‘Desire’ and ‘Angel of Harlem’ with acoustic guitars, I could hear the drums before they came out of the P.A.”
Lillywhite has been involved, wholly or in part, producing or co-producing, on numerous projects with the band since their 1980 debut album, including 1991’s Achtung Baby, which U2 played in its entirety at Sphere. The answer to the timing problem, he reveals, was to screen the drums with Plexiglas, albeit a custom-made, multi-piece set to meet the aesthetic sensibilities of U2 and their creative team.
TWO LEVELS OF SURROUND
Located midway up Sphere’s auditorium is the immersive sound system, with 10 Holoplot array locations into which O’Herlihy directs Edge’s guitar treatments, effects and various amplifier combinations—what is known as “shimmer” in the U2 camp. “That shimmer effect at times will go up into the immersive section and then cross the entire room from side to side,” he says.
He also distributes elements of the keyboard contributions of longtime, unseen live musician Terry Lawless, under the stage in Terry World, into the immersive system. In the song “One,” an organ sound begins near Edge, who also plays keyboards live, before moving through the immersive system and overhead across the dome, O’Herlihy says. “That creates an incredible, very atmospheric, choral, orchestral sound.”
At the building’s top concourse level is an extended surround system of eight Holoplot arrays at the rear of the auditorium. Spatial sound sources moving around the room can be panned into the surround arrays, but, O’Herlihy cautions, “Subtlety is the name of the game. It defeats the purpose if it’s something that takes you out of the song.”
Lillywhite agrees: “The first thing in my mind was that this had to be a rock show. It didn’t feel like we needed to reinvent the wheel. And you don’t want the audience thinking too much about the sound. Honestly, the visuals give you all the wow factor you need.”
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Restraint was the watchword, not least because panning some sounds too far to the perimeter tended to introduce unacceptable timing issues. “We tried a few real gimmicky things and decided to pull the plug on those,” Lillywhite reports. That said, during “The Fly,” strings of numbers on the screen move upward into an apparent hole above the audience during the guitar solo. “I knew everyone would be looking up, so I panned the guitar to where that hole is. I’m not sure many people even noticed, but it was just a little cheesy thing.”
Overall, he summarizes, “I describe the sound as a warm hug. Most of the sound comes from where the musicians are, but occasionally you hear things coming out the sides, like the keyboards and Edge’s shimmer. Those are the warm, huggy things.”
