Not to be confused with Area 51, the top-secret US government facility, AREA15 is an immersive entertainment district just moments from the Las Vegas Strip, which recently upgraded its audio experience with a HOLOPLOT X1 Matrix Array sound system. The new tech was installed in The Portal, AREA15’s landmark venue, which offers experiences for the whole family, including rides and VR, live performances, DJs and food, but definitely no top-secret experiments….
The Portal is a large grey concrete cuboid, allowing a 360-degree projection map across the walls and floor from Panasonic projectors. The venue is designed to be a sandbox for any experience imaginable and, therefore, required an adaptable audio system for different events. At Halloween, for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show is projection-mapped on all four walls by and supported by live actors, but The Portal has also hosted fine art shows and corporate events.
Mark Stutzman, CTO at AREA15, commented: “Our motto is ‘AREA15 does not exist’ because you can make your own story. It can be anything you want it to be.”
The newly installed HOLOPLOT X1 system consists of two arrays of two MD96 Audio Modules, topped with two MD80-S, positioned left and right at a height of 25ft at one end of the room.
JD Bouck, director of production said the original sound system had never been able to match the quality of the images from the projectors, owing to acoustics like a giant fish tank and highly reflective, smooth walls.
He said: “The Portal was one of the biggest concerns we had. It is a 7,000sqft, completely blank canvas. Thanks to our Panasonic projectors, we can make visual landscapes and have great storytelling for the eyes, but the audio picture was never able to complement these. The Portal is not built like any other real venue that I’ve ever been to. There is nothing to soften it, no balcony or mezzanine, just hard surfaces. So there was never a product that checked all the boxes.”
The HOLOPLOT system, he says, was used to tackle the difficulties caused by the reflective surfaces. Bouck explained: “The 3D Audio-Beamforming technology allowed us to focus so that we could cut the reflections off the walls and make sure the people at the back of the room were getting the same audio picture as the people at the front of the room. All without having to run a ton of delays or having a bunch of loudspeakers in front of the projection surfaces.”
The HOLOPLOT team supported Bouck throughout the whole process, from system planning to providing room calculations until final commissioning and tuning.
Bouck added: “The Matrix Arrays sounded like a huge distributed system, like everyone had their own little PA, whether they were standing against the wall, or in the middle of the room. It didn’t matter where they were, their audio experience was not diminished in any position.”
Stutzman concluded: “The HOLOPLOT team really worked with us, listening to our ideas and taking it all into consideration. Our DJ shows can be up to five or six hours long. The guests can come and go, but the staff – our technicians, security, and bartenders – are here all night, and we have a duty of care to them, to ensure they’re comfortable. We didn’t want the ear fatigue you usually get from really loud festivals. So now we have a system that is really super versatile, allowing us to adapt the audio for any event without the need to reconfigure the hardware, but always provides that top audio experience to match the visuals in the space.”
