Holoplot and Areal boost Tomorrowland's sound immersion 2024

The emblematic Atmosphere stage of this festival held in Belgium has featured the X1 immersive sound system from Holoplot, which has been combined with spatial audio software from Areal to create an echo-free soundscape.

The international electronic music festival Tomorrowland, an unmissable event for fans of electronic music that takes place annually in the Belgian town of Boom and which this year celebrated its twentieth edition, has counted on Holoplot X1 immersive sound system.

Specifically, This system has been responsible for providing sound to the scenery Atmosphere, a huge custom-made circus tent, about 30×30 meters and with the capacity to house until 5.000 personas, in which world-famous DJs have performed.

The Holoplot system uses two main matrices, which consist of six modules X1 each, in turn with six enclosures with two modules X1. One of the challenges to overcome has been the highly reflective surfaces that caused echoes in the listening area., which prevented there from being a sweet spot to get the most out of the immersive content played on stage.

Pieter Doms, sound engineer at Noizboyz and co-founder of stereo mixing solution Areal, has been responsible for the sound design of the sixteen Tomorrowland stages and chose the Holoplot X1 system to enhance the audio experience at Atmosphere.

“I was very surprised by the sound quality that could be achieved because I expected beamforming to reduce it,” he explains.. sounds great, almost as clean as a studio monitor. It's amazing how quality increases when you only focus the audio on people and don't create any reflections. You get a very clean sound and that improves the immersive experience. Gives you that small club feeling, “but you are in a huge tent”.

Edition after edition, this festival that this year celebrated its twentieth call, has had an evolution in the active development and search for new technologies to exceed the standards of its musical experiences. For Doms, Holoplot was the next step to improve audio in Atmosphere and enhance the immersive feeling of this great stage.

In this technological advance, those responsible for Tomorrowland, along with Noizboyz, They had already developed new software that allowed them to mix stereo signals into multichannel content in real time and that was used for a couple of years in that scenario..

One of the problems was that the size of the tent and the distributed system required were still a challenge for the designers., with additional speakers needed to achieve surround sound effects that caused increased reflections and confusion in the diffuse field.

The use of Holoplot sound control, delivering the immersive results of mixed content through spatial audio software Areal to the crowd without echoes.

For this, the two basic pillars of Holoplot technology are used.: the 3D audio beamforming and the wavefield synthesis. “Both allow us to control sound in 3D space,” he says. Sebastian Boeldt, senior application engineer of this company-. We can precisely shape coverage areas in the audience zone, but also avoid certain forms of the enclosure, which minimizes reflections and improves performance clarity.”.

Horizontal control of Holoplot, not only allows the creation of controllable coverage zones, but also the precise alignment of gain and delay between them.

“This means we can increase the optimal dip point and minimize delay spread.”, a key parameter when designing immersive systems -Boeldt points out-. The combination of sound control by avoiding tent surfaces and dividing the crowd into time-aligned coverage zones creates a perfect foundation for Areal technology to shine.”.

As this professional adds, “the widespread misconception that volume is always better does not apply here, and thanks to the isolated but aligned areas that X1 created and the multichannel content of the Areal engine we achieved excellent results. It sounded really compact., giving that feeling of a small and immersive nightclub”.