Last month, Bon Iver marked the 10th anniversary of the band’s breakthrough second album Bon Iver, Bon Iver, with two immersive live shows under the moniker Sincerely Grateful at the YouTube Theatre at Hollywood Park. Headliner takes a look at how L-Acoustics’ L-ISA technology helped deliver a “visceral, communal explosion of emotion”.
Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon and his band performed the double Grammy-winning album in full, plus additional material - the first concerts they had performed in more than a year and a half. The shows also represented the first official worldwide deployment of the new L-Acoustics L-ISA Processor II.
“My goal with this band is always to enhance the music and connect with the audience, not distract them with the sound,” said Xandy Whitesel, FOH engineer for both shows.
“When it comes to immersive audio, there’s a fine line between glitz and gold, but the intimacy that L-ISA can bring to even a big venue like the YouTube Theater is amazing. I equate it to what it must have been like going from listening to mono recordings in the ’50s to first hearing stereo in the ’60s. Suddenly there's a whole new world out there, and it’s much more sonically interesting and engaging.”
He added that the L-Acoustics immersive audio platform enables him to “more easily make my mix sound huge and beautiful, and I can use spatial panning in ways that I'd previously feel guilty for. That can radically change how one mixes because normally we make so many choices and compromises based on building a clean and big-sounding ‘mono-ish’ left-right mix.
"With L-ISA, the mix from my FOH position translates consistently to almost the entire venue — not just to a narrow strip of audience standing in the middle of the room. I heard someone describe these YouTube Theater shows as a ‘visceral, communal explosion of emotion,’ which perfectly sums up the ideal Bon Iver concert experience that L-ISA helps create.”
Whitesel also used L-ISA technology for the second leg of the band’s i,i tour in early 2020, but his first experience with it came at the Santa Barbara Bowl two years prior. The recent availability of L-ISA Processor II, he commented, provides an additional improvement on a system he was already incredibly fond of.
“The new spatial front-fill is an uber-cool improvement,” he said. “Before now, front-fill was mono, and so this new ability finally brings a full spatially immersive experience to the very front rows. L-Acoustics has also developed a new reverb that’s remarkable. The ones that I normally use are stereo, whereas the onboard L-ISA reverb spreads out the ‘verb tail amongst the whole L-ISA configuration, and it sounds fantastic.
“The new Controller software adds several new features that greatly enhance usability as well. There is a feature for tying solo on the desk — in my case, a DiGiCo Quantum7 feeding out to all of L-ISA’s 96 available objects — to focus on the correct object in the L-ISA Controller software.
"And they added compatibility with stereo channels and groups, which also helped me easily translate my left-right session and left-right brain to the L-ISA Scene/Extension setup. Even though it does take some training and practice to optimally use object-based audio, I don’t think it’s possible to have a bad mix with L-ISA.”
While one might assume that transforming a 6,000-seat venue’s fixed stereo loudspeaker system into a 7.1 L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal spatial audio design would require major investment in additional gear and time, both shows disproved that theory.
The venue’s stage PA primarily features 57 L-Acoustics K2 and 30 Kara II enclosures that make up the LCR main arrays and out-fill hangs. For Bon Iver’s shows, local certified provider 3G Productions brought in 11 more K2, plus 24 extra Kara II for the panoramic system’s extension arrays.
Meanwhile, the switchover time to lower, reconfigure, and re-fly the entire loudspeaker system to match the L-ISA design took only five hours from start to finish.
L-Acoustics head of product and technology marketing, Scott Sugden, described the end result:
“Although most fans walking into these shows didn’t know what to expect, what they heard was much more clear, detailed, and nuanced than they had ever experienced before,” he stated. “Even if they were seated all the way at the back of the venue, it felt like Justin was ten feet in front of them.
"The effects of his voice engulfed the entire theatre and enveloped each patron with sound, giving the shows the intimacy of listening to the band on headphones. But it also very much had the dynamic raw power of a live performance and the ability to connect the fans with the artists on stage.
“L-Acoustics has spent the last 30 years developing technologies to ensure that everyone in the audience has an amazing experience, and L-ISA is the absolute culmination of those efforts. It will be hard for those fans who were at one of these shows to go back to a ‘regular’ concert again after experiencing this.”