Morrison, CO (October 14, 2025)—Few venues are more legendary than Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater. A naturally formed venue, the site began hosting concerts in 1906 on a temporary stage. Things have progressed a great deal in the 119 years since then, and now it recently hosted its first first-ever immersive audio event, featuring Mersiv, a Denver-based electronic music producer and DJ.
Providing audio for the show was regional provider Brown Note Productions, which collaborated with Mersiv’s engineer Andrew Kirschman and d&b audiotechnik. The show built upon Red Rocks’ existing SL-Series system with the addition of strategically placed V-Series speaker towers to bring immersion at the venue.
The main system included eight GSL8 over a half-dozen GSL12 with six flown SL-SUB per side, supplemented by six ground SL-SUBs, four Y10P point source loudspeakers as fills, and a pair of V-Series V8 per side as side fills. For the towers in the audience, six V-series arrays (four V8 loudspeakers per tower) were deployed, spread from 60 to 290 feet from the stage with a 100-foot elevation change. The system was powered by 34 D80 amplifiers with ArrayProcessing, and Soundscape with En-Scene software was enabled by the DS100 signal engine. Networking was provided by the DS10 audio network bridge, and controlled using R1 Remote control software.
Beyond working in an outdoor setting, there were many challenges afoot, as Matt Brown, Brown Note audio technician, explained: “[Mersiv] wanted to give his fans a club-like experience, but at Red Rocks, which is a massive, 400-foot long, 100-foot high, open-air venue, this would normally be very difficult to achieve.”
Brown Note Productions, advocated to try d&b Soundscape, which had never been deployed at Red Rocks, demoing a scaled down setup to illustrate how it could be applied. Once the Mersiv team was onboard, there were further design hurdles due to the venue being a National Park; as a result, they had to get prior approval on every aspect of the production.
Red Rocks Rolls Out New Roof
A simulation was necessary to win approvals, said Brown: “We started with a very detailed model of Red Rocks in ArrayCalc and worked with d&b to determine where we could place the loudspeakers to optimize the Soundscape installation and do it in the least invasive way possible. ArrayCalc is such an impressive tool to overcome design challenges and there was no other way to look at what to expect in this space without ArrayCalc.”
Ultimately they were approved to place speaker towers within an 8’x8’ footprint, employing d&b’s V-Series, V8 loudspeakers. To allow Mersiv to practice in advance, Brown Note created another scaled-down version of the system at its facility for six days of artist rehearsals. “We then took our programming and scaled it up to the size of Red Rocks by adjusting our positioning plane within the Soundscape software,” said Brown. “Soundscape made it easy and this minimized our need for extensive programming time on site.”
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d&b Soundscape with En-Scene software was used to position sound objects throughout the venue. Brown described its creative application, noting, “We ran Soundscape with En-Scene to place stationary objects across the span of the venue. We set a left/right implementation through each pair of towers so that there was a consistent level experience for everybody.”
The event began with a dramatic activation sequence for each tower, synchronized with lights and lasers, creating a truly immersive opening. Throughout the show, Mersiv took individual audio stems and elements and used En-Scene to move that content around the venue, elevating the audio experience to match the energy of the lighting, video, and lasers surrounding the venue. Brown describes the experience, “Sound moved throughout the venue, whizzing by at different moments during songs. The whole thing was really impactful and this was all made possible with Soundscape.”
