UFC 306: Noche at Sphere - Immersive Sound System Promises New World of Audio Massive system has an aural granularity in which even spoken syllables are processed individually By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Monday, October 7, 2024 - 1:04 pm
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The synergy of sports and entertainment is well on its way to becoming a singularity. With lavaliere microphones regularly worn by MLB outfielders, it might not be a stretch to see a left fielder strap on a Fender Stratocaster.
Less absurd, though, is how Sphere, the year-old futuristic event venue in Las Vegas, seems poised to become a sports stadium. Noche UFC (UFC 306 PPV) at Sphere - Suga Sean O'Malley vs. Merab The Machine Dvalishvili - held there on Sept. 14 and broadcast on ESPN sets the stage for that. The first sports event from the Madison Square Garden-owned, 18,600-seat spherical building off the Las Vegas Strip went out over multiple distribution channels: ESPN+ PPV (English and Spanish), with prelims available on ESPN+, ESPNEWS, ESPN Deportes, and SiriusXM Fight Nation 156.
How the UFC event came to be there reflects the ongoing integration of sports and entertainment. After attending a show during U2's 2023-24 residency at the venue, UFC President/CEO Dana White decided that he wanted to host an event there. That resulted in the mixed-martial-arts company's biggest production to date.
UFC 306: Noche was the first sports event at Las Vegas's Sphere.
The event's production credits also suggest that burgeoning synergy. Silent House Group, brought in to produce the in-venue show, was fresh off Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour. Audio Supervisor Michael Abbott, who has a four-decades-long association with the sound for the Grammy Awards telecast, was hired by Silent House to manage the 64-channel-audio playback of a series of purpose-produced 90-second video segments created to define the narrative around the marquee bout.
Complex Signal Path This audio was fed via MADI into Sphere's Holoplot sound system and to a pair of Lawo Powercores and into the Lawo router. The Lawo console used for front-of-house sound bused the audio tracks into the arrays of Sphere's Holoplot sound system, itself a technical beast. The world's largest concert-grade audio system, it consists of approximately 1,600 permanently installed and 300 movable Holoplot X1 matrix-array loudspeaker modules and comprises a total of 167,000 individually amplified speaker drivers. The system's 3D audio-beamforming and wavefield-synthesis technology delivers immersive sound and effects that can be highly localized throughout an entire audience area.
Not surprisingly for this first-of-its-type production, Abbott found that the audio strategy had to be built from the ground up. The project had multiple deliverables, he recalls. There was the broadcast that needed a stereo mix of the film content for the broadcast, a stereo downmix of that content, and an M&E [music & effects] stem without dialog for the international feed; and they added three languages - French, Spanish, and Portuguese - onto voiceovers of the [videos]. Then there was the added content for the world[-feed] transitions out of the interstitial films back into live, both for the broadcast and for the space, with a sound-design bed that would play out to transition into the fight sequence.
The Code In fact, the venue and the broadcast shared audio elements while producing completely separate shows (DJs in the house, sports announcers on-air) with shared music and effects (from both open mics and prerecords) across them, and audio mix had to follow direction from both the live and broadcast productions.
The way to manage that, says Abbott, who also supervised the audio for the NHL Draft held at Sphere in late June, was with SMPTE timecode. The emphasis on timecode-driven content, both audio and video, is growing and growing. It's the best way to manage a lot of content live.
The next element to be addressed was how the films' director, Glenn Weiss, and Fight Director Anthony Giordano managed the transitions out of the film/world-feed clips into the fighter-combo packages played out in the media plane. The videos of the fighter-combo packages had four EVS playout video channels sequenced into PiP Audio boxes on Sphere's 160,000-sq.-ft. LED media plane surrounding the audience. Both the audio and the multiple video clips had to be synchronized for these sequences.
The core audio for the fighter-combo packages from the EVS replay deck comprised eight key channels. Channels 1 and 2 would be the stereo for broadcast, 3 and 4 the international M&E tracks, 5 and 6 the M&E tracks for the live sound in the bowl, 7 the main dialog track, and 8 reserved for timecode.
Every triggered event was assigned a specific timecode address for the EVS fighter-combo package playout. Some actions shared an address; for instance, one triggered the music for two walk-ons as well as all the lighting cues and PixMob LED bracelets, like the ones Silent House deployed for Taylor Swift concerts.
The Venue as a Member of the Team Though kind of an arena on steroids, Sphere itself is its own technology proposition. What would also be the UFC's first show on ESPN broadcast in 1080p relied on UFC's typical truck, NEP NCP7 A and B units, the night before the fight as well as NEP EN3 A and B and Denali Summit A and B for production of the fight itself.
Abbott says that, over the past year, much of the time he has worked in the venue on various projects has been spent understanding just how different Sphere is as a production venue. For instance, achieving a high level of speech intelligibility - critical for noisy sports events - is no simple task when the number of transducers reaches national-debt level.
That's why we ended
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
06/07/2026
Long-developed relationships and informal access, three production models, and c...
06/07/2026
The deal follows Lumine's recent acquisition of Synamedia's video-networ...
06/07/2026
This former SportsCenter producer is shaping local-team studio coverage to surro...
06/07/2026
IMS Productions and FOX Sports deployed more than 100 cameras, 32 onboard feeds,...
06/07/2026
Lumine Group Inc. has announced the completion of its acquisition of the Video Network Business from Synamedia. The business will operate as a standalone compan...
06/07/2026
NASCAR has announced a content and commercial partnership with Motorsport Network, a motorsports and automotive media platform, to distribute NASCAR original co...
06/07/2026
Versant Media Group has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Full Swing, a sports technology company, from Bruin Capital and a group of minority investor...
06/07/2026
DAZN has announced global broadcast rights to 3ICE, a professional hockey format featuring three skaters and a goalkeeper per side, with no power plays or offsi...
06/07/2026
Bundle gains 100 new synths & more
Synth Anthology 5 the largest and most feature-packed edition of UVI's hardware synth emulation bundle, bringing toge...
06/07/2026
Available now via free firmware update
MOTU have just announced that three of their popular audio interfaces now boast official Milan Certification. The 16A...
06/07/2026
Rohde & Schwarz completes Hunter Preliminary Design Review for the Integrated Co...
06/07/2026
The R&S IMAGER from Rohde & Schwarz uses millimeter wave imaging to inspect the ...
06/07/2026
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
06/07/2026
Digital Domain Appoints Industry Veteran Patrick Davenport as Executive Vice Pre...
06/07/2026
Gravity Media USA appoints Brittney Boston as Head of Business Development
Brie Clayton July 6, 2026
0 Comments
The strategic new appointment supports...
06/07/2026
Remote Editing Without Cloud Storage in Resolve
Michael Cioni July 6, 2026
0 Comments
This is a step-by-step guide that demonstrates how to setup your...
06/07/2026
Automatic Caption Translation in Adobe Premiere Pro
Colin Smith July 6, 2026
0 Comments
Here I showcase the innovative automatic caption translation f...
06/07/2026
Flavor's First Ever Managing Director Neal Cohen Retires; Longstanding Execu...
06/07/2026
How Adam Rosenwach Pivoted from Music to Medtech Without Missing a Beat What do the rehearsal room and the boardroom have in common? More than you might think...
06/07/2026
Zhongyi Optics unveils the Dreamy Zone T1 FF Cine Lens Series on Indiegogo with ...
06/07/2026
Techtel debuts insyght: making ST 2110 media discovery easy
intellisphereinsyght2026
6 July Written By Suzanne Costello
Sydney, Australia - 06 July 2026 T...
06/07/2026
Monday 6 July 2026
Sky agrees to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment, creating a ...
06/07/2026
Fresh from his World Cup heroics with Cabo Verde, Roberto Pico' Lopes will join the RT panel for Argentina v Egypt tomorrow and for the England v Norway q...
06/07/2026
Nations have long invested in domestic infrastructure to advance their economies, protect and use their data, and take advantage of technology opportunities in ...
06/07/2026
Every year, the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) reveals where thousands of AI researchers have decided to put their work.
This year's ...
06/07/2026
A death can be unsuspicious, but it has to be explained
What happened to Ke...
05/07/2026
We've gone to another level of integrating the graphics into the set architecture' - Zac Fields, SVP, Graphic Technology and Integration, FOX Sports...
05/07/2026
Browser-based and desktop apps available
Digital Sunset Studios have been busy working on an interesting project: a free software tool that provides compute...
04/07/2026
When Canada qualified for the FIFA World Cup 2026, OneSoccer knew this wasn'...
04/07/2026
Celebrates company's 80th anniversary
Rhodes have recently revealed that they will be producing a limited run of electric pianos in celebration of their...
04/07/2026
Blackmagic Design Cameras Empower Youth Broadcasting Program
Brie Clayton July 3, 2026
0 Comments
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro and Blackmagi...
04/07/2026
iZotope Joins Boris FX
Boris Yamnitsky July 3, 2026
0 Comments
iZotope, the team behind RX and Ozone, is joining Boris FX. A letter from founder Boris...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
03/07/2026
New bundle & three Single Packs
Continuing to expand their already sizeable orchestral collection, VSL's latest release introduces three new Single Pack...
03/07/2026
Venue installs new ATC-equipped control room
LSO St Luke's, a unique music venue that also serves as the home of the London Symphony Orchestra, have rec...
03/07/2026
Caden Pearson appointed new Commissioning Editor for NITV
3 July, 2026
Media releases
National Indigenous Television (NITV) has strengthened its commitment...
03/07/2026
1 February 2023
SHARE Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email
Munich, Germany, 1st February 2023: Cinegy GmbH, the premier provider of software technology for digit...
03/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/07/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
03/07/2026
Death Star
Andy Marken July 2, 2026
0 Comments
Look, I can't get involved. I've got work to do. It's not that I like the Empire; I hate i...
03/07/2026
Berklee's New Visual Identity: Honoring Our History, Building for What's...
03/07/2026
Scripps Research scientists awarded $2M to advance global disease surveillance Two Gates Foundation grants will expand wastewater surveillance and AI-driven dis...
03/07/2026
Joan Pulupa joins Scripps Research faculty to study the organization of DNA in brain cells and its links to neurodegeneration Using smell-sensing neurons and ad...
02/07/2026
Entering her senior year, this hometown girl is paving a career in live sports production gaining experience in replay and audio and as a TD
In the live-sports...
02/07/2026
In-venue and creative video staffers at the professional and collegiate level ha...
UFC 306: Noche at Sphere - Immersive Sound System Promises New World of Audio Massive system has an aural granularity in which even spoken syllables are processed individually By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
