Newest concert venue will stand apart

The representatives from German audio technology company Holoplot divide our group into two parallel lines five feet apart, standing perpendicular to a wall of speakers 50 feet away. Our line hears a guitar. After we swap positions with the other line, we then hear a violin—and no guitar, even though it’s still playing just five feet away. If that wasn’t impressive enough, another recording starts playing at a certain volume, and when we walk up and put our ears to the speaker stack—“don’t try this with any other sound system!” warns the Holoplot rep—we still hear it at the same exact volume.

Now imagine the same experience from the last row in an 18,000-plus-seat arena. Steerable sound, as demonstrated during a May 18 Vip/press event inside a

Strip-adjacent hangar, will be just one of several technological innovations featured in the forthcoming MSG Sphere arena. And when they are all simultaneously deployed mid-show, the resulting multisensory experience will dramatically alter the concertgoing experience.

The wow-factors threaten to spilleth over for the Madison Square Garden Company venue, set to break ground behind the Venetian sometime this year and open by the end of 2020. Its physical presence—the 360-foot-tall venue takes its name from its shape—will embolden the already icon-loaded Strip skyline, especially when its 190,000 linear feet of LED lighting is plugged in.

That’ll dominate your Instagram feed, as will the awe-striking, 170,000-squarefoot hi-res LED screen that will line nearly half of the globe’s interior and extend all the way over the entire performance and seating area, consuming its giant audience not unlike Caesars Palace’s former — and much smaller — Omnimax Theatre. Complementing that giant screen will be the aforementioned steerable sound; bass-centric infrasound haptic floor panels that will enable you to feel everything you’re hearing and seeing; mechanisms that can re-create weather-like sensations; supersized wifi connectivity that will reverse years of poor mid-concert cellular reception; and, in the coming years, augmented reality features that will further merge the analog and digital realms. At this point, you might be asking yourself: Is this a concert venue or a Disney ride?

It’s not the only question left unanswered (the event didn’t include a Q&A session). For one: Who’s going to perform in such a venue, given its size and

COURTESY An artist’s rendering shows the MSG Sphere Las Vegas arena project, slated to open in 2020 behind the Venetian and Palazzo. This view shows “cloak mode,” which appears to make the structure disappear by displaying the city’s background.