First Assume A Spherical Soundstage

Immersive, Intense and Intimate Imaged Sound

There is a cross-disciplinary joke that runs along the lines of: A frustrated farmer is trying to increase milk production in his dairy herd. After consulting farmers, agriculture experts, veterinarians and psychologists, he turns to a physicist who claims to solve the problem. But the simplified solution starts with “First, assume a spherical cow in a vacuum.” The “spherical cow” a proxy for problems so complex that their abstractions collapse into memes, comedy, futility or some combinatorial melange.

The spherical cow approximation has literally shaped amplified arena sound reinforcement since the first electronic instruments needed to fill much larger venues. While venues with resonant cavities (Carnegie Hall) can cast the sounds of an orchestra into the upper tiers, assuming a respectfully quiet audience, most modern sound stages emulate a point source — the band’s front of house mix emanating from a single point, or perhaps proximal two stereo points, usually near the drummer and/or bass players. With advances in echo cancellation, speaker towers, and driver design, modern concert venues have sound that is usually bright, loud, and evenly dispersed. My personal experience, though, is that some bass is lost, vocals can be muddied if not carefully amplified and compressed, and some arenas still suffer from echo (I saw Rush at Madison Square Garden in 2010, before they fixed the ceiling, and every Neil Peart cymbal hit found my left and right ears just milliseconds apart).

Three weeks ago I saw Phish at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and it inverted every mental model of concert sound I have constructed. It was as close to a religious experience as I have had at a concert, and I went down the rabbit hole of exploring the technology for all five hours of our return flight. Rolling Stone magazine, usually dismissive of progressive rock and jam bands and their fans, had kind words about the Phish residency.

Phish isn’t really a band you watch for their stage presence, outside of bassist Mike Gordon’s bobblehead impulses driven by his picking style and speed. It’s the lights, the waves of hope and sheets of light and lumens and minor to major chords that create a number of open spaces for your senses to explore. You have sight, you have sound, and depending upon the hygiene and weed quality of the fans in rows around you, quite possibly smell.

With all deference to Dead & Company, Phish is ultimate band to run the Sphere sound and LED video systems through their paces. The visuals were simply astonishing — animations tied to the rhythm and intensity of the jams, virtual Kuroda rigs multiplied across the entire Sphere screen like Mickey’s sorcerer brooms or the hammers in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”

The swirling colors coalesce into — what else — a donut. This conveys the sheer scale of the Sphere video screen, and the fact that it appears optically flat is even more remarkable when you consider the degree of curvature.

I’m going way down the sound system rabbit hole, because it delivered an experience that dwarfed, eclipsed and rendered moot every argument made by an audiophile, a high-end stereo magazine subscriber, and those armchair analog engineers who know tubes sound better and your turntable needs to be isolated from the floor of your listening room.

The Sphere inverts the usual concert dynamics of point sound source (in this case, the stage and speaker stacks) diffusing sound through the arena. You, personally, are in the sonic center of more than 100,000 individual speakers, spreading the sound stage across several hundred feet of visual space, and quite literally beaming the sound back to you at the center. The Holoplot sound system can aim particular sounds at specific regions of the seating area, or it can create imaging that directs a very wide, precise sound stage to you.

The net result is a crystal clear sound, where you hear every piano note, every crossing vocal, every splash cymbal hit with precision (absolutely no delay, jitter or echo), clarity and richness that makes you feel like you’re sitting on the floor of Phish’s practice barn, with the band arrayed in front of you, an audience of one fully immersed in the soundscape. If Trey’s guitar solos deep in a jam are the “hose,” then running them through the Holoplot gives you five orders of magnitude more pinpoint streams tickling your inner ear.

There are more than 100,000 drivers that create for audio transparency, aiming through grillwork, trusses, and accounting for reflection and echo cancellation. While you are seated in a semi-circle facing the Mann Music Center stage, you get perhaps100 by 50 linear feet of audio drivers fanning out to the seats; in the Sphere the audio drivers are beaming down to you, and from the net effect, to you alone.

There is a third (or fourth) sense engaged in the Sphere’s musical output: the proprioception enhanced by the in-seat haptics. Much as your phone tingling in your pants pocket informs you of a new text or Slack message, the in seat haptics add a sensory rumble to anything about two octaves below middle C. When Gordon got plucky with his low B string, or switched on the octave divider to take his lines down into those rumble strip territories, the shake delivered through the seat cushion was totally immersive. I found myself precisely divided between wanting to stand up and dance my floppy puppet moves and relishing those bass hits coming up my spine.

Two nights at the Sphere rank in my top five most meaningful concert experiences (Springsteen at the old Philly Spectrum in 1981, a pure display of showmanship and stamina in my first arena concert experience; Coheed and Cambria at the Rumsey Playfield in 2011, raw energy and the first new music I’d listened to in a decade; the penultimate R40 Rush show in Las Vegas, a musical retrospective perfectly executed that encapsulated 15 years of father-son x prog rock x fan boy love)

The multiplicative effect of the bouncy seats, the midtown skyscraper sized videos, and the beamed sound re-inforced the feeling that you were in the soft chewy center of your own Phish universe for a few hours. It was a mild — and fun — departure from the usual spirit of camaraderie and can-you-believe-it reactions. As a different Phish experience it won’t fully supplant an outdoor venue on a hot summer day with 20,000 of your wayward circus friends but I heartily recommend assuming spherical cow funk.