“You guys definitely have to be the first band into the Sphere, because this is the future”: U2’s live sound engineer on how he persuaded Bono and The Edge to be the Las Vegas Sphere’s first resident band [Video]

U2‘s astounding recent residency at the newly constructed Las Vegas Sphere was not only a visual spectacle, the immersive 40 live dates were also a showcase for the futuristic spherical venue’s revolutionary live sound capabilities, harnessing beam forming and wave-field synthesis technology.

But behind such a notably audacious live event, at the world’s biggest spherical building, came years of preparation. In an interview for U2.com, the band’s long-standing live sound engineer Joe O’Herlihy shared the preparation he undertook to integrate the band’s setup into the mind-boggling new space, and remembers being blown away by the results: “The sound in The Sphere is absolutely phenomenal,” said Joe, who has been on the road with the band for over forty years.

O’Herlihy shared that Bono began thinking about the then in-development Sphere – and its Immersive Sound System, developed by Berlin company Holoplot – in August 2021. “[Bono asked] if I could go over to Berlin and see if …