L-Acoustics L-ISA immerses VIP stage at Soundstorm
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Since 2019, MDLBeast has also curated Soundstorm Festival, the Middle East region’s largest gathering of artists and fans with over 200 acts and three quarters of a million visitors over four days. For the most recent edition, the push to offer innovative experiences saw Soundstorm invite Polygon Live and their L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal technology to create and curate a stage for VIP audiences.
Polygon Live is a 360°, immersive sonic experience where speakers play spatialised sound synchronised with an immersive light installation, while different aromas are dispersed around the stage to enhance the immersive experience. Polygon has been used at Thailand’s Wonderfruit festival since 2018 where members of the MDLBeast team first experienced it.
The Polygon stage offered an enveloping audio canvas that allowed performers to freely move sound within a hemisphere of loudspeaker sources, encompassing the audience with surround and overhead layers to create a whole body experience and elicit the tribal feeling that is so much a part of Polygon’s offering.
"We chose to use L-ISA because of the simplicity and intuitive nature of how the controller acts,” explains Matt Hill, spatial sound engineer at Polygon. “It is a very hands-on and creative platform for spatialising content, whilst also being a very aesthetically pleasing user interface to work with. I love the introduction of features in L-ISA 3.0 and I can’t wait to explore how further integration with other content and software can lead to exciting, creative and interactive outcomes."
Using L-Acoustics Soundvision software, the team designed a solution based on the successful L-ISA configuration used at Wonderfruit. The 1,500-capacity VIP stage, which was located within the UG Lounge, was encased by a circular perimeter of 102 shipping containers stacked to a height of 7.5m, which would create disturbing acoustic reflections. To mitigate this, Polygon worked with acoustic consultants, Vanguardia, who recommended a solution that included covering the stacks with acoustic material moving the stage 15 metres off-centre offset and thereby reduce reflections.
The final L-ISA configuration, installed by Dubai-based rental company MediaPro, featured four arrays of eight L-Acoustics Kara deployed as a frontal system, with a surround ring of eight arrays of four Kara rigged from the Polygon truss structure and facing its centre. The elevation configuration comprised eight X15 coaxial speakers in a ring, all facing directly downwards. Low end enhancement was delivered through 16 ground-stacked KS28 subwoofers.
“We knew we were offering something very different at Soundstorm and that L-ISA was the technology that could achieve it,” says Polygon founder and CEO Nico Elliot.
