Now in its 20th year, the iconic festival celebrating all genres of electronic music is hosted in the aptly named town of Boom in Belgium. 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 30m high and 30m wide, it can accommodate up to five thousand techno fans. The system utilizes two main arrays consisting of six X1 modules each, with six surrounds of two X1 modules each.
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, is responsible for the sound design of all 16 stages at Tomorrowland and chose the HOLOPLOT system to improve the audio experience at Atmosphere.
“I was really shocked with the sound quality that was achievable because I expected beamforming to decrease it,” he says. “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 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 echos.
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.
About HOLOPLOT
HOLOPLOT is a pro audio company from Berlin, driven by enabling the next generation of audio experiences and transforming the way society engages with sound. HOLOPLOT technology enables users to provide pristine sound quality for all, with integrated immersive capabilities for increased creative freedom.
The company’s technology is science-based, software-driven, and hardware-enabled — granting users unparalleled tools for ultra-precise control over sound propagation and localization. Its products offer a host of advantages for customers across a broad spectrum of applications such as live entertainment, immersive and experiential environments and corporate applications.
HOLOPLOT has received numerous awards, including the prestigious industry AV Award “Audio Technology of the Year” and the PLASA “Innovation Award”, as well as “Best in Show” awards from both ISE (‘22, ’23 & ‘24) and InfoComm (‘22 & ‘24), and featured in the TIME Best Inventions list of 2022, as well as the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies list of 2024.
For more information, visit holoplot.com.
About Areal
Founded in 2021 and based in Belgium, Areal, in collaboration with Tomorrowland, set out to create a means of turning any DJ set and live performances into a fully immersive listening experience. An easily accessible piece of software, the patented Areal upmixing engine removes the need for often labor-intensive pre-production needs, elevating live sound via a conversion engine that turns stereo sound into immersive audio. Available at the end of 2026, the same conversion principle will be made available to consumers as well via patented headphones that turn your favorite songs into a spatial composition.
For more information, visit www.areal.world