When the monolithic $2.3 billion MSG Sphere Las Vegas switched on its 580,000 square-foot LED Exosphere on July 4 with a message “Hello World” followed by a fireworks display, the eyes of Earth laser focused on the dome that has been rising from the caliche of the Strip since 2019.

In an instant, billions of vivid impressions stretched across the globe from the world’s largest LED screen, leaving many in disbelief as to whether what they were seeing was even real. Sphere’s ability to surprise and delight people with its hyper realism will not fade for some time as the grand opening is scheduled for September 29 with the launch of U2’s hotly anticipated 25-night residency “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere.”

Los Angeles goes inside Sphere as Madison Square Garden Entertainment executives debut the proprietary Sphere Immersive Sound. Designed and customized by Sphere Studios in partnership with Berlin-based 3D audio technology creator Holoplot, the audio capabilities promise to reengineer the future of concerts and residencies from top artists. 

What You’ll Hear

“Sound as part of the human experience is very important,” says James L. Dolan, MSG Entertainment’s executive chairman and CEO. “What we have created here is as close as I think you can get in a venue to replicating the human sense of sound.” 

Imagine hearing every note crystal-clear from your favorite band, delivered directly to your seat, no matter what the event is. Sphere accomplishes this through the world’s largest fully integrated 3D beam-forming and wave field synthesis concert-grade audio system. Each audience member essentially gets their own concert—as if they are listening through headphones.

To best illustrate this concept, an acoustic mix of “Pride” by U2, was created especially for the venue. Its pristine clarity and focus sounds a lot different than on your 1984 Sony Walkman.

“If you can imagine sitting in your seat, hearing [Bono sing] and seeing him on stage … I don’t care if you have seen U2 200 times, you’ve never experienced this,” Dolan says, asserting there is no building in the world that will deliver music as it was intended to sound like Sphere. “I think some artists will find it daunting because if you sing the wrong note, everybody’s going to hear it.”

Why It Sounds So Good

“You’ll notice very few right angles in this building,” says David Dibble, CEO of MSG Ventures, a division of Sphere Entertainment. “We took a playbook from the ancient Greek amphitheater-style seating to allow the audience to get as close to the performance as possible in as intimate a way as possible. With 20,000 seats, we think we’ve achieved that.” 

However, a round space equals a nightmare for most sound engineers, Dibble notes.

MSG found the solution with Holoplot, revered for its work with the PA systems in another challenging audio environment: Germany’s Deutsche Bahn train stations. The company were charged them with the task of creating an advanced concert-grade audio system. After 10 years of research and development and four years of working on Sphere, Holoplot CEO Roman Sick feels they have accomplished the mission.

“[Our goal was to] enable a sound experience that is not dominated by the space in which you are experiencing it, and to reproduce sound in the most authentic way,” Sick says. “In order to achieve that, we control the sound in the space as much as possible. We developed a completely new category of audio system. It’s not a point source. It’s not a line array. It’s a metrics array. It has hundreds of individually amplified drivers and each of them individually address and help us to generate different types of sound waves. We can define through software interfaces where we want to have sound, and most importantly, where we do not want to have it.”

The proprietary beam-forming technology can also simultaneously send unique audio content to specific locations in the venue, creating the possibility for different sections to hear different languages, music or sound effects—offering limitless opportunities for truly customized and immersive audio experiences. When creating audio beams, the sound designer can specify the exact area for each audio beam to cover, avoid, or ignore, from among seven distinct types of beams.

Sick characterizes it overall as an “enormous audio system” with approximately 1,600 permanently installed and 300 mobile HOLOPLOT X1 Matrix Array loudspeaker modules. The Sphere’s Proscenium features the largest loudspeaker array on Earth, consisting of 464 modules. 

According to Dibble, you will never see any speakers in the Sphere — although he shares that there are actually 167,000 speaker drivers, amplifiers and processing channels and up to 256 channels of mix available — as the sound system is 99 percent hidden behind a 160,000 square foot acoustically transparent custom-designed LED display plane that wraps over and around the audience to create a fully immersive environment.

“Our team developed an algorithm that allows us to compensate for the expected transmission loss in certain conditions to essentially make the LED screen acoustically invisible,” he says. 

In order to create immersive sound, Holoplot developed Wave Field Synthesis capabilities, a spatial audio rendering technique that leverages virtual acoustic environments; sound designers create a virtual point of origin, which can then be placed in a precise spatial location. This enables audio to be directed to the listener so that it sounds close, even though the source is far away.

What You’ll Feel

The system has two coverage modes from which to choose: full venue, used for large concerts and residencies; and immersive mode, designed for more intimate experiences that will engage the Sphere’s 10,000 immersive seats with an infrasound haptic system, allowing the audience to feel the music. Each coverage mode automatically adjusts and compensates for changes in atmospheric conditions such as temperature and humidity, allowing the venue to provide a consistent sound quality regardless of the current environmental conditions.

These haptic seats have the same “same audio reflective value as human skin,” Dibble says, “Making them acoustically optimal. When a seat is unoccupied, we want it to behave acoustically the same as an occupied seat. They behave the same way as a body from an acoustic standpoint.”

Sphere also features 4D technologies such as warm breezes, evocative scents and changing temperatures, to create multi-sensory experiences that take storytelling to an entirely new level. 

Immersive mode will be used during showings of the first Sphere Experience, “Postcard from Earth,” directed by Darren Aronofsky, debuting on October 6. Approximately 60 minutes in length, it will run multiple times per day, year-round. Sphere Experiences are produced by Sphere Studios film crews traveling the world to film scenes with Big Sky camera systems, with the world’s sharpest cinematic lenses capable of delivering the edge-to-edge optical requirements for Sphere’s 16K x 16K immersive display plane

The Behind-the-Scenes Experience

While great complexities exist behind the scenes and with the technology, Sphere and Holoplot sought to make the experience for artists as seamless as possible. They created hardware and software tools that enable content to be created for Sphere prior to ever setting foot in the venue. This suite of proprietary tools includes modeling and prediction software and system tuning tools.

“We’ve also created a tool set that makes it intuitive, straightforward, and dare I say even easy for artists, to come in and take their existing content and create a mix for this venue,” Dabble says of Sphere. “We have an instance where someone brought in original stems and three minutes later, they were playing inside this venue. It’s not a heavy lift. It’s a tweak.”