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 ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
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 
