Roman Sick leads Holoplot, a science-based immersive audio company. Holoplot creates hardware and software products that push the boundaries of conventional audio and speaker technology, a radical new approach to generating high-quality audio. The company has created immersive sound experiences for Area15, Illuminarium and Sphere in Las Vegas.
‘Sphere Immersive Sound’ is the world’s largest concert-grade audio system creating an unparalleled listening experience for 20,000 people. Comprising around 1,600 permanently installed Holoplot X1 Matrix Array loudspeaker modules, totalling 167,000 individually amplified loudspeaker drivers, the system uses Holoplot’s 3D Audio-Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis technology to transform how audio is delivered in large-scale venues. The result is controlled, consistent, crystal-clear audio.
“The beauty and the beast of our technology is that it sounds too good on paper to be true,” Sick told Headliner in 2023. “This is a next generation, software-driven audio technology that allows you to use sound with an extremely high degree of flexibility and fidelity. In general, we provide a completely new level of control over sound propagation by creating custom soundwaves, which are perfectly tailored via software to target the desired audience area only and hardly lose energy over distance.
“On the functional side, we thereby enable people to achieve significantly better results wherever they want to use sound, because all the negative effects of sound bouncing off objects, travelling in all directions and level attenuation are removed. On the more creative side, we offer sound designers, show producers and mixing engineers another layer of access to their creative content and experience creation.
“It’s not just sound reproduction anymore, it’s a new toolbox that allows you to paint creatively with sound output as opposed to just sound input. That completely enables a new level of creativity that simply wasn’t there before.”