6 February 2025
The technology behind Atmosphere Stage’s immersive, crystal-clear soundscape
Among the standout game-changers at Tomorrowland 2024 was HOLOPLOT’s X1 system, which redefined the sonic landscape of the festival’s Atmosphere stage.
As the legendary festival marked its 20th anniversary in Boom, Belgium, the cutting-edge audio solution delivered an immersive experience that brought a small-club intensity to a grand-scale setting.
The Atmosphere stage, a towering structure nearly 30 metres high and 30 metres wide, became home to a stellar lineup of techno’s finest. With a capacity of up to 5,000 festivalgoers, ensuring a consistently high-quality audio experience across the space posed a significant challenge. To meet this demand, HOLOPLOT deployed a configuration featuring two main arrays, each comprising six X1 modules, alongside six surround arrays of two X1 modules each.
One of the primary obstacles in achieving pristine sound quality was the highly reflective surfaces within the stage structure, which led to disruptive echoes and an uneven distribution of the immersive sound content. Addressing this, Tomorrowland’s audio team, in collaboration with Noizboyz, had previously introduced an innovative software solution that allowed for real-time upmixing of stereo signals into multi-channel content.
While this approach had been in place for several years, the vast scale of the Atmosphere tent and the necessity for a distributed speaker system continued to present challenges. Additional loudspeakers, essential for surround sound effects, inadvertently contributed to unwanted reflections, complicating the sonic clarity within the space.
"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. 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," said Pieter Doms, sound engineer at Noizboyz and co-founder of the Areal stereo mixing solution.
Sebastian Boeldt, senior applications engineer at HOLOPLOT, further elaborated on the synergy between the X1 system and the spatial audio technology: "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.”
With HOLOPLOT’s advanced technology at its core, Tomorrowland’s Atmosphere stage delivered a heightened auditory experience—proving that even in large-scale festival environments, the right innovation can bring the intimacy of a club to thousands of music lovers.
