HOLOPLOT’s origins came when German Tonmeister Helmut Oellers and DSP engineer Adrián Lara Moreno started an audio research firm near Berlin in 2011. It was still relatively small with just a few employees when Roman Sick joined the company as CEO in 2016.
Within a few years, a chance meeting with Sphere Entertainment execs at a tradeshow would be followed by HOLOPLOT developing X1 in record time and increasing production of concert-grade X1 units, pushing the boutique company toward the big time.
A key X1 advantage over HOLOPLOT’s Orion system is that the design places amplification and control behind each of the modules, thus avoiding a lot of wiring. This, together with advances in the modules’ rigging design, enabled the system to be easily expanded, Lego-style, for mega-projects like Sphere.
Wowing the Crowds
On July 20, 2023, James Dolan, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sphere Entertainment, joined Sphere Entertainment’s David Dibble (CEO, MSG Ventures) and Paul Freeman (Principal Audio Artist) and Holoplot’s Roman Sick to welcome journalists to Sphere in Las Vegas for the first chance to listen to the new 17,600-seat venue’s high-tech sound system.
At that point, the 580,000 square-foot “Exosphere” wrapping the 516×366-foot (WxH) Sphere was still brand-new and the venue’s 160,000 square-foot interior LED screen had yet to be unveiled. The focus was purely on audio, and the demo obliterated any skepticism as to whether HOLOPLOT could actually work within a massive, spherical venue.
Within days, the word started spreading about Sphere Immersive Sound, powered by HOLOPLOT. Partially owned by Sphere Entertainment (and since purchased outright), HOLOPLOT worked with the Sphere team to create the massive, unique audio system.
Landmark concert residencies packed the venue with sold-out shows. U2 kicked things off with its U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere series. Next up was Phish, with four unique shows, followed by Dead & Company’s residency. Next up are the Eagles, set to perform 20 weekend shows starting Sept. 20, 2024, and Sphere’s first EDM show — Anyma’s The End of Genesys — kicks off in late December.
In between the live concerts, Sphere has been offering its venue-specific multi-sensory immersive film, Postcard from Earth. It provides a 50-minute taste of what Sphere can offer, with the AV experience enhanced with other effects, including 10,000 seats equipped with haptic motion and vibration effects.
The HOLOPLOT Difference
Almost a year after the introduction to HOLOPLOT’s sound system with the impressive July 2023 audio demo at Sphere, HOLOPLOT invited FRONT of HOUSE to another demo — but not at the Sphere. Instead, we visited HOLOPLOT’s modest shop location, a compact and modern but modest facility a few blocks away from the glamor of the Las Vegas Strip.
Upon entering the shop, visitors can view Orion, the company’s proof of concept loudspeaker, first installed to clarify spoken-word announcements in reverberant European train stations. Next, is the rock-concert ready X1 Matrix Array, part of the system in use at Sphere. After that sits X2, which was featured at the June 2024 InfoComm show. X2 is designed to serve as a slimmer, lighter-weight alternative to the concert grade X1, meeting the needs of houses of worship and other venues looking for exceptional clarity and musicality without the need for rock concert SPLs.
Farther into the warehouse, HOLOPLOT sales manager James Bobel and senior applications engineer Michael Amorello showed off the facility’s compact demo area. There’s a simple L-C-R stacked speaker setup, with L-R stacks of one X1 MD96 module over one X1 MD80-S 18” unit per side to demonstrate L-R stereo mix possibilities. These are elevated 6’ to 8’ off the floor. In the center, matching the height of the L-R units, four more MD96 Matrix Arrays sit atop MD80-S units. A projection screen visually represents the beam steering characteristics of each portion of the demo.
The Shop Demo
The small demo space effectively reveals what’s happening with HOLOPLOT’s patented 3D Audio-Beamforming technology, which makes use of intelligent algorithms to precisely guide audio within a given space.
The demo area has not been acoustically treated for audio demos — but a black curtain separating the demo area from the forklifts does make it a bit less reverberant that a typical warehouse space.
Bobel and Amorello ran through the characteristics that make HOLOPLOT’s technologies unique, revealing that use cases go beyond immersive installations with the technology able to improve audio for more established sound reproduction formats such as stereo deployments.
Playing a voice audio sample to highlight spoken-word clarity, with the projection screen showing where the beam was directed, a listener could step into the zone and hear the crisp audio. Standing a few feet away, the sound outside the zone was sharply diminished and muffled, as if you had walked into an adjacent room and shut the door behind you.
This ability to tightly control the vocals in coverage zones is a useful feature in applications such as transportation hubs, where speech intelligibility is of the utmost importance. By keeping the audio in one zone, the content also does not add to the general noise floor, creating a more comfortable environment.
As the projection screen highlighted which Matrix Arrays were active and where that sound was directed, you could walk around the room and hear how a sample of soft rock music changed and — most importantly — didn’t change from one side of the room to the other. For example, using just the X1 MD96 Matrix Array and X1 MD80-S unit on the sides, a stereo rock mix remained perfectly balanced on both sides of the room, and was consistent from the front to the rear of the space, providing a better audience listening experience, rather than just those positioned in a venue’s sweet spot.
Then the demo turned to three songs in one — with the recorded vocalist singing in three different languages. As with the spoken-word demo, the different language vocals could still be heard a bit outside each respective zone, but that zone’s language was prominent while the other language vocals were muffled.
It might be hard to imagine a real-world concert where this would be an advantage. But some HOLOPLOT clients, including an auto show in China, have already used Matrix Arrays to create multi-language zones, allowing attendees to listen to presentations in different languages without needing to use earphones or headsets.
The shop demo also included a sample of EDM music using more of the units in the room to open up the system’s capabilities for low-end thump, a feature the company plans to expand on within their product development roadmap.
The most impressive part of the demo was a recording that transformed the room into a storm-tossed ship at sea, with ambient ocean waves splashing against the hull, a captain’s shout from the distance and seabirds moving in space. Walking around the room, the listener could also hear a ghostly whisper in just a sliver of the room’s total space.
This segment revealed the creative potential of using sound beams to catch listeners by surprise with audible Easter eggs, to the surprise and delight, perhaps, of visitors to a theme park attraction. Most importantly, this extreme content example showcased the unique combination and impact of 3D Audio-Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis.
Other Projects
Installed at New York’s Beacon Theatre, solo acoustic shows featuring Phish frontman Trey Anastasio debuted the venue’s then brand-new Sphere Immersive Sound system in August 2022.
HOLOPLOT X1 modules were deployed last fall in a festival setting — the Starlite Occident Festival in Marbella, Spain, including Iggy Pop and the Black Eyed Peas, and the X1 Matrix Arrays have returned to support artists performing in this year’s concert series as well.
Another portable application late last year was the Nintendo Live experience at PAX West, a gaming event in Seattle. There, Creative Technology US provided a HOLOPLOT X1 system to ensure that a performance by the 50-piece Legend of Zelda Orchestra would be heard loud and clear in the audience area only.
HOLOPLOT’s X1 was also used by award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry for Lightroom in London’s opening art exhibition, David Hockney: Bigger & Closer, and again with sound designer Tom Hackley for The Moonwalkers, with direction and narration from actor Tom Hanks along with an Anne Nitkin score recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Hackley credited the system’s ability to steer the audio with software instead of having to physically reposition point-source speakers.
A recent installation for the immersive Portal portion of Las Vegas’ Area15 multi-sensory attraction showed how HOLOPLOT modules can be used to enhance an existing sound reinforcement environment. There, director of production JD Bouck added X1 to further enhance the immersive audio paired with visuals from Panasonic 4K projectors.
Looking to the Future
With the concert-grade X1 modules joined by the slimmer, lighter-weight X2, the range of HOLOPLOT installations and temporary sound reinforcement applications will undoubtedly expand as a wide array of house of worship and other facilities seek to optimize spoken word intelligibility and musicality in their spaces.
For more, visit www.holoplot.com
