JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort Entrepreneurial Event

Context

The Team

L-ISA Impresses Entrepreneurs at JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort

This exclusive, four-day corporate event is one of the country’s most prestigious, by-invitation-only CEO events. Annually gathering over 1,000 of the nation’s top executives, entrepreneurs, advisors, investors, and other business leaders for a prestigious dinner and gala, each year’s event revolves around a central theme. The 2019 event honoring top entrepreneurs held at Palm Desert, California’s JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort, and emceed by Late Night’s Seth Meyers, had a theme of “innovation.”

The Challenge

With such an exclusive event honoring top entrepreneurs and high-growth market-leading companies, the event sound and decor needed to be on the leading edge of technology to impress its affluent crowd. Creating fully immersive audio to accompany the event’s dramatic visual and thematic elements was key. The video display arrangement ringing the resort’s 25,000-square-foot Desert Ballroom with massive LED walls needed accompanying audio to match components such as a visual display of water during a video segment on water’s criticality resources for global sustainability. “We were met with the challenge of offering a full 360° immersive experience for 1,200 people,” says Robert Newton, the global production leader on the client-side.

The Solution

Leading full production services provider LMG was tasked with building a sound system that would adhere to the event’s central theme of “innovation” and match the elaborate video display arrangement with massive LED walls ringing the resort’s 25,000-square-foot Desert Ballroom. A total of 136 speakers were used to create the 360° L-ISA Hyperreal Immersive Sound technology configuration, supporting over 160 channels of audio created by the client’s creative services team to complement the four opening videos for each day of the conference. These included seven arrays of nine L-Acoustics Kiva II enclosures comprising the Scene system—the primary system over the stage—plus far left and right hangs of two ARCS Wide enclosures per side for additional fill. Also, three SB28 subs per side were laterally positioned in front of the stage wings, while six compact 5XT speakers delivered frontfill, and four more were used for central stage monitoring.

The elevation speakers, which provided the critical overhead effect, comprised 40 short-throw 5XT—eight enclosures spread out across each of the five ceiling trusses—all firing downward. “Those are what enabled us to get the realistic feel of flowing water across to the audience,” said Shane Smith, LMG Director of Audio Services.

System pictures

The Result

The end result was a 15.1.15 sound field environment, unprecedented for large-scale, critical corporate applications like this. Smith said, “The Kiva II arrays allowed the sound to precisely follow the movements of the presenters on stage in a very natural and engaging way, while the Syva surrounds and 5XT coaxials overhead totally enveloped the audience in the engaging journey that the client designed for the program. The overall effect was absolutely amazing, and you could see it in the audience’s reaction. L-ISA is truly showing us the future of live events.”

Project photos