Spatial audio, which creates an immersive three-dimensional soundscope with multi-channel formats like Dolby Atmos, where sounds appear to be coming from in front of you, from the sides, the rear and even above, has been one of the buzzwords in music streaming and consumer technology in recent years. Apple has shouted from the rooftops about its spatialised tracks on Apple Music and its AirPods and HomePods’ support of them, and brands like Sonos, Bose and Bang & Olufsen took little time to headline some of their headphones and speaker spec sheets with their versions of the innovative audio technology too.
It’s in wireless headphones, complete with head-tracking so that the presentation moves dynamically as you do, and in wireless speakers. It is even in the Netflix catalogue (for movie and TV soundtracks, of course). It is, per my and the rest of the What Hi-Fi? team’s consensus, an interesting audio development that in practice is about as hit-and-miss as Darwin Nunez’s ball striking (I’ll let the football fans amongst you decide the ratio there), both in terms of music mixing and hardware delivery. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not (yet anyway) the consistent and reliable man Friday of good old-fashioned stereo.
In my opinion, if spatial audio technology is going to truly wow and have a future, to sit more towards ‘Godsend’ than ‘gimmick’ on the value scale, it needs more room than what is between your ears and headphones and more physicality than that offered by a single-source speaker system – it needs to be in a studio or a car or in a rigged-up live music space (Las Vegas’s The Sphere venue springs to mind first). An outdoor festival in one of London’s iconic parks? Now we’re talking.
Live music production Polygon has recently announced it is putting on the “largest outdoor spatial audio festival the UK has ever seen” in London’s Crystal Palace Park next May. The three-day event, called Polygon Live LDN, will see almost 20 artists take to Polygon’s first-ever dual-dome stage. Essentially it’s squashing two of its hemispherical domes together for double the space – and speaker count (200!).
The announcement reads: “Every dome boasts a 12.1.4 immersive system: 12 pristine L-Acoustics speaker arrays around the audience, one giant festival-grade wall of subs for earth-shaking bass, and four overhead line arrays raining crystal-clear sound from above. The total count amounts to a little less than 100 speakers in over 25 unique positions. That’s five times the speakers a stage of similar size would use.”
Those speaker arrays from French high-end audio company L-Acoustics should, I would think, impress, considering a colleague gave a glowing write-up of the brand's multi-channel setups, not once but twice.
And, for the assault (or should I say pleasure) of the full senses, and taking me back to a Four Tet gig at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2019: “Between every speaker, a lattice of perfectly synchronised lighting. The network of LEDs that cocoons the Polygon stage is programmed to shimmer, pulse and swirl precisely in time with the music.”
If I wasn’t already tempted enough by that to book a ticket home from Australia, one of my current favourite artists, the wonderful Pakistan-American visionary that is Arooj Aftab, is on the lineup, alongside electronic whizzes such as Jon Hopkins, Gold Panda and Halina Rice; the supremely versatile multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney; experimental electropop DJ Photay (get your ears around Off-Piste); and Tinariwen, a guitar-based band I’m unfamiliar with from the Saharan desert region *adds to playlist*. This could be very special indeed.
Polygon Live LDN will take place on Friday 2nd, Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th May 2025, with day ticket prices starting at £53.35 (including fees).
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