Blip.031: A Sphere in the Desert

That’s no moon.

As much as I love what Spotify does with my various Daily Mix playlists, there’s one thing that Apple Music still has over it—two, actually: George Stroumboulopoulos and Zane Lowe. I’ve been a fan of Strombo for years and have learned a ton about making space by watching his conversations. I don’t have the same kind of history with Zane, but every interview I see him do is curious and insightful and leaves me wanting more. Yesterday, he interviewed U2 at Sphere in Las Vegas, which looks like it’s going to be an incredible venue. It’s the largest spherical structure on the planet and was designed specifically for entertainment. LCD screens on both the interior and exterior are able to display video at 16K resolution. Think of it as seeing a concert inside a massive version of the Volume used on The Mandalorian. At one point in the interview, Bono was talking about the immense scale of the screens and said, “You can see a human or four humans, each of them the size of the Statue of Liberty.” As for sound, the stacks of Marshall’s on the stage behind the band and the massive arrays of speakers hanging from trusses you’re used to seeing have been replaced by more than 164,000 individual speakers capable of reproducing immersive, spatial sound fields. U2 will be the inaugural act at Sphere with a 5-show run in the Fall called “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere.”

Tickets are available by lottery here .

Sphere Las Vegas under construction.

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