Las Vegas, NV (October 2, 2023)—U2 inaugurated the innovative Sphere performance venue in Las Vegas this weekend and audiences, including celebrity guests Paul McCartney, Katy Perry and Dr. Dre, nearly lost their minds from the sensory overload.
The 18,000-seat venue is truly immersive, from the Holoplot speaker system to the 160,000-square-foot wraparound 16K x 16K resolution LED screen—the “media plane,” in the parlance of the Sphere team—which encourages audience members to choose their own experience and focus on whatever catches their eye. U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, the somewhat unwieldy title of U2’s 25-show residency, certainly gave audiences plenty to look at, from dense, eye-popping graphics to unnervingly realistic moving images of Las Vegas, shot from the perspective of the venue, and the Nevada desert.
Despite the Holoplot system’s immersive capabilities, the band’s long, long-time FOH engineer, Joe O’Herlihy, chose to largely focus the sound image in the stage area for U2’s show, occasionally spinning guitar or effects out to either side of the audience. In fact, the installed Holoplot system at Sphere (a Holoplot system was also installed at MSG’s Beacon Theatre in New York about a year ago) includes a concentration of speakers where a traditional theater proscenium would be for just that purpose. In all, the integrated Holoplot setup incorporates 1,600 speaker cabinets, each housing nearly 100 drivers in a matrix of three layers, supporting low, mid and high frequencies respectively—a total of 167,000 speaker drivers, amplifiers and processing channels.
To Hear The Sphere: First Peek at Landmark Vegas Venue’s Immersive Sound
The Holoplot sound system can do much more with its 3D Audio Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis technology than was required by a rock ‘n‘ roll show, even one by such a creative outfit as U2. No doubt future productions, perhaps even Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth documentary film, which debuts later this week on October 6 and which was shot using Sphere’s homegrown ultra high-resolution Big Sky camera, will put it through its paces.
Of course, an over-the-top experience was exactly what James L. Dolan—who oversees New York City’s Madison Square Garden and Beacon Theatre and owns the New York Knicks (NBA) and New York Rangers (NHL) franchises—intended when he first sketched out the orb-like theater seven years ago. At 516 feet wide by 366 feet tall, Sphere is the world’s largest spherical structure, according to owners MSG Entertainment. And while Sphere (there is no “the,” say the owners) is dwarfed by the Las Vegas skyline, it punches well above its weight thanks to the Exosphere, the 580,000-square-foot programmable LED on the orb’s exterior, which is programmed for 24/7 displays of eye-catching art and advertising.
Not surprisingly, press reviews of the opening weekend have concentrated on U2’s performance, their first on-stage appearance since the Joshua Tree Tour of 2019. The band played every song from their 1991 album, Achtung Baby, a couple of classics from 1987’s The Joshua Tree, a set of Rattle and Hum (1988) songs and a handful of singles, including their latest, a celebration of Las Vegas as a nuclear testing tourism destination, “Atomic City.”
But one reviewer, Andy Greene of Rolling Stone, spared a few sentences for the sound, which, he wrote, “[W]asn’t the sludgy, sonic assault you typically get at an arena or stadium concert. It is clear, crisp, and pristine, making earplugs completely unnecessary. As advertised, this was a quantum leap forward for concerts.”
Look for an extensive exploration of the Sphere and its multitude of innovative systems in an upcoming issue of Mix!
