For its 20th year, the iconic Tomorrowland festival celebrating all genres of electronic music returned to the aptly named town of Boom in Belgium over two summer weekends. This year, HOLOPLOT’s X1 system was chosen to provide the sound for The Atmosphere stage, a custom-made circus-top tent featuring DJs including Amber Broos, DYEN, Ellen Allien, Olympe, Adam Beyer and others. At close to 30 meters high and 30 meters wide, the tent can accommodate up to 5,000 techno fans. The system solution utilizes two main arrays in a left / right setup, consisting of six X1 modules each, with six surrounds of two X1 modules each.
Challenges
The key challenges to overcome were the highly reflective surfaces causing echoes in the listening area, preventing an even sweet spot to fully benefit from the immersive content played at the stage. Pieter Doms, sound engineer at Noizboyz and co-founder of stereo upmixing solution Areal (www.areal.world), was responsible for the sound design of all 16 stages at Tomorrowland and chose the HOLOPLOT system to improve the audio experience at Atmosphere.
Perhaps best known for its application in the Sphere at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, HOLOPLOT’s X1 Matrix Array Audio Module is designed for performance audio, while combining aspects of line array and electronic beam steering technologies. By featuring complete sound control in horizontal and vertical axes creating up to 12 beams per array, the X1 is ideally suited for use in difficult acoustical spaces, such as a huge tented space with round, highly reflective walls.
Speaking of the system employed at Tomorrowland, Doms says “I was really shocked with the sound quality that was achievable, because I expected beamforming to decrease it. It sounds great, almost studio-monitor clean. It’s amazing how the quality rises when you just focus audio on the people and don’t create any reflections. You get a very clean sound, and that improves the immersive experience. It gives you that small club feeling, but you’re in a ginormous tent.”
The Next Step
As noted, the festival is in its 20th year, a massive milestone for the event. It focuses on continually evolving, actively developing and seeking new technologies to push the bar for their music experiences. For Doms, HOLOPLOT was the obvious next step to improve the audio at Atmosphere and enhance the immersive feel of the stage.
In the spirit of technological advancement, Tomorrowland — together with Noizboyz — had already developed a new piece of software, allowing them to upmix stereo signals into multi-channel content in real time. This had been used at Atmosphere for a couple of years already, but the size of the tent and the required distributed system had still proven challenging for the designers in the past, with the additional loudspeakers needed to achieve the surround sound effects causing increased reflections and confusion in the diffuse field. Using X1 allows better control of sound, delivering the immersive results of the upmixed content via Areal to the crowd without echoes.
Sound Tools
Enabling this are the two core pillars of HOLOPLOT technology, 3D Audio-Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis. “Both allow us to control sound in the 3D space,” states Sebastian Boeldt, senior application engineer at HOLOPLOT. “We can precisely shape the coverage areas in the audience zone, but also avoid certain shapes of the venue, minimizing reflections and improving the clarity of the performance.”
HOLOPLOT’s horizontal control not only allows for the creation of controllable coverage zones, but also the precise gain and delay alignment between them.
“This means we can increase the immersive sweet spot and minimize the delay spread, a key parameter when designing immersive systems,” Boeldt explains. “The combination of sound control via avoidance of the tent surfaces and division of the crowd into time aligned coverage zones create a perfect base canvas for the Areal technology to shine. It’s a really flexible piece of software that paired beautifully with the X1 system.”
“The widespread misconception that loud is always better doesn’t apply here, and thanks to the isolated — yet aligned — zones X1 created and the multi-channel content from the Areal engine, we achieved great results. It sounded really tight, giving that small immersive club feeling,” concludes Doms.
For more info about HOLOPLOT, visit www.holoplot.com.
