LEA Professional amplifiers are powering 124 moving speakers to deliver 3D immersive audio in a $2 million spherical concert hall, suspended in air in New York City.
The Shed is an iteration of Sonic Sphere, an ever-evolving concert hall that was conceived in the tradition of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kugelauditorium, a nearly spherical concert hall built for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka. It is the brainchild of Ed Cooke, a British cognitive science expert and entrepreneur, sound architect Merijn Royaards, and engineering director Nicholas Christie. Since 2021, Cooke and his team have built Sonic Spheres in France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and the United States, including Burning Man. Each time, the hall has grown bigger; the sphere at The Shed in New York City is the 11th and most advanced sphere to date.
Suspended in air and costing more than $2 million, The Shed has a diameter of nearly 20m and capacity for 250 people, who sit or lie in netted areas. Its infrastructure includes 1,178 steel struts, 3,200 metres of cloth, and 12 structural cables supporting the sphere from the roof. This revolutionary new architectural space features immersive, 3D sound and light explorations of music by boundary-pushing artists. Within the sphere, guests are surrounded by 124 meticulously arranged loudspeakers that move sound above, below, through, and around the body. Sound and light waves are sculpted into spatialised, temporal architectures. Together, they create hyperreal and deeply multisensory, shared experiences. To power the immersive experience, the creative team behind the Sonic Sphere turned to amplifiers from LEA Professional.
Merijn Royaards, creative director at Sonic Sphere, said: “We were amazed with the LEA Amplifiers. The footprint of each amplifier was a lot smaller, they perform over and above what we were used to, and they've got a really helpful interface and an excellent way of tuning a system, which we were missing very much with our previous solution. And suddenly, many previously difficult or impossible things were easy for us to accomplish.”
Sonic Sphere installed 31 Connect Series 354D amplifiers to power the immersive audio experience.
Brian Pickowitz, VP of marketing at LEA Professional, said: “Sonic Sphere really is a laboratory for the senses, where technology and art come alive. We’re very proud to have played a role in such a transcendental experience.”
