Tomorrowland, Boom, Belgium
X1 provides small-club feeling for the Atmosphere stage
The Atmosphere stage
Immersive dance music experience
Its reputation preceding it, Tomorrowland celebrated its 20th year in 2024, continuing to push the bar to create the best quality electronic dance music experiences.
Lights and LED were already providing a 360, enveloping experience at the festival’s Atmosphere stage, but the audio quality was not up to Tomorrowland’s standard - until now!
A HOLOPLOT X1 system was deployed, providing the best, immersive listening for the line up including: Amber Broos, Dyen, Ellen Allien, Hi-Lo, Blk., Olympe, Adam Beyer, Andromedik, Dimension
A pointed challenge
Reflections and a high diffuse field
A custom built tented stage with a capacity of up to 5000 ravers, the Atmosphere stage sports a 30m high, pointed ceiling made out of highly reflective canvas material.
A collaboration between HOLOPLOT and Areal, a stereo upmixing software developed between Tomorrowland and Noizboyz widened the sweet spot by taming the highly reflective tent walls - all while reducing overall sound levels.
"Thank God we came across the HOLOPLOT system. We were able to focus more on the audience area and not on the bad reflective area. You get a really clean sound and tight sound and that improves the immersive experience that you now have at Atmosphere."
— Pieter Doms, Noizboyz and co-founder Areal
The solution: X1 in a left/right setup combined with surrounds
"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. You get a very clean, tight sound, and that improves the immersive experience.”
— Pieter Doms, Noizboyz and co-founder Areal
The system design
Two target zones and better alignment
The HOLOPLOT system’s Sound Control in the horizontal axis allows for the creation of individually controllable coverage zones. All zones can be precise gain and delay aligned to each other, minimizing the delay spread, a key parameter when designing immersive systems.
Additionally, thanks to the active avoidance of the reflective tent surfaces, the sound is concentrated on the audience area only, reducing echos for clearer sound.
Increasing the immersive sweet spot
Multi beam advantage
Each array can produce up to 12 beams. Each beam can be individually tailored to cover a precisely defined area.
In case of the Atmosphere stage, multiple beams are deployed simultaneously, each with a separate, optimized delay for the front and back of the audience area.
3D Audio-Beamforming enables this granular alignment technique, eliminating echoes and allowing for the inclusion of a larger part of the audience into the immersive sweet spot.
Technology partnership
Areal - upmixing solution for live events
The Areal Live solution upmixes stereo sources to a multichannel spatial experience in real time. By enveloping the audience in multi-channel audio content, the perceived volume is increased without actually raising the sound level.
Combining this algorithm with HOLOPLOT technology drastically reduces noise breakout and pollution outside of the spatial zone.
“The combination of our advanced HOLOPLOT Sound Control, avoiding the tent surfaces and the division of the crowd into time aligned coverage zones creates a perfect base canvas for the Areal solution to shine. It’s a really flexible piece of technology that paired beautifully with the X1 system.”
Sebastian Boeldt, Senior Application Engineer at HOLOPLOT
