No relation to Nevada’s Area 51, Area15 is an immersive entertainment district close to the Las Vegas Strip that includes The Illuminarium. Already equipped with a Holoplot X1 Matrix Array, the venue recently upgraded its audio with a Holoplot X1 system for The Portal, a multi-use venue and key element of its experiential entertainment.
‘Our motto is “Area15 does not exist” because you can make your own story,’ says Area15 CTO, Mark Stutzman. ‘It can be anything you want it to be.’
The Portal is Area15’s landmark venue, and can be used for private dining, all-night DJ sets, and everything between. At Halloween, for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show is projection-mapped on all four walls of the venue and supported by live actors, but it has also been home to fine art shows and corporate events.
Acting as a sandbox for any experience imaginable, The Portal is a vast grey concrete cuboid, allowing a 360° projection map across the walls and floor. While the visual elements were stunning, but Director of Production JD Bouck found the original sound system unable to keep up. Now, the flexibility of the newly installed Holoplot X1 system – which comprises two arrays of two MD96 Audio Modules with two MD80-S at one end of the room – ensures the space meets the creative ambition of the Area15 team.
‘The Portal was one of the biggest concerns we had,’ he recalls. ‘It is a 7,000sq-ft, 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.’
In the exploration phase for a new sound system, Bouck and his team began to run into issues. ‘The Portal is not built like any other real venue that I’ve ever been to,’ Bouck explains. ‘There is nothing to soften it, no balcony or mezzanine, just hard surfaces. So there was never a product that checked all the boxes.’
‘It was the reflective surfaces that we were really trying to tackle with the Holoplot system. 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 process, from system planning to providing room calculations until final commissioning and tuning. ‘We finally got X1 into the venue and on the first night we just wanted to fire it up and see what happened, even before we had fine-tuned it,’ Bouck says. ‘It was like the weight had just been lifted off our shoulders. 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.’
Regular visitors have noticed the positive change, but it’s not just audience members who have benefitted. ‘Loud isn’t always good; good is good,’ Stutzman says. ‘We now have great audio quality without it having to scream in your face.
‘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.’
More: https://holoplot.com
