U2 Achtung Baby Live launches Sphere in Las Vegas

U2 opened the first of its kind Sphere venue in Las Vegas with Achtung Baby Live, in what proved to be a truly immersive audio visual feast for those in attendance.

The Sphere venue in Las Vegas is, as its name suggests, a spherical venue boasting the world’s largest high resolution LED screen, which lines the venue inside and out. It also features an immersive audio system from Berlin-based pro audio and tech company Holoplot, whose speakers sit behind the screens so as not to obstruct the unique visual element of the venue.

The show marked the first show of U2’s residency at Sphere, where they will play 25 dates. The residency will see the band celebrate their Achtung Baby album, as well as its ZOO TV tour from 1991. U2 also took the opportunity to air their brand new song Atomic City.

Headliner spoke to Holoplot CEO Roman Sick about the company’s work on the venue and what it means for the live events industry going forward.

“It’s going to change the world,” he said prior to the U2 launch event, “in terms of how we experience entertainment and what the next generation of that looks like. It follows a fantastic vision and we’ve been working on it closely with MSG for a number of years now. It’s going to be something the world has never seen before in terms of scale and capabilities. For us as a company, it has been a great opportunity to develop. It has challenged us enormously; I think every major manufacturer would have been challenged by the scale and complexity of the project, so we had to grow up very quickly.

“But we maybe had an advantage over others because as we were growing, we were able to put the bricks in just the way they needed to be in order to make something like this happen. We could still decide on how we were doing things to be optimal for projects of that scale, whereas others may not have that flexibility anymore because they already have established infrastructures. 

"It was great to overcome those challenges, and it’s a real validation of our technology. We have been working with some of the best people in the industry, and they took a very close look at us – ‘who is that little company from Berlin that is trying to make the audio experience happen here’? And we were able to prove multiple times what we can do and that we’re ready for it."

You can read our interview with Sick here or watch it in full below.

Lead picture by Sam Jones, second picture by Rich Fury