CASE STUDY

Boomtown Fair 2025
United Kingdom

Immersive audio in the heart of Boomtown’s forest and underground districts

Boomtown Fair, held each year at the Matterley Estate in the UK, has evolved into one of Europe’s most imaginative and ambitious festivals. With more than 70,000 visitors and eight themed districts spread across a vast woodland site, Boomtown blends music, performance art, and immersive storytelling into a city-scale experience.

For a festival built around world-building and full-environment design, sound plays a central role in shaping how visitors experience each district. In 2025, two of Boomtown’s most characterful stages, Anara Forest and Spectrum 360, integrated Areal immersive processing to deliver a powerful and enveloping 360° sound experience, while keeping the artistic character of each stage fully intact.

ANARA FOREST
loudspeakers - L-Acoustics Kara
configuration - 6-point

Anara Forest, 360° sound inside the woods

Deep within Boomtown’s woodland district, the Anara Forest stage is surrounded by trees and natural reflections, creating a visually stunning but acoustically challenging setting. The stage featured a L-Acoustics Kara 6-point surround sound system, designed to draw the audience into a tight, circular dancefloor environment.

The Areal UPMIX ENGINE was deployed at Anara Forest to upmix the stereo DJ sources into a fully spatial, 360° sound field that matched the stage’s physical speaker layout.

The goal was not only to widen the mix, but to create an immersive bubble that kept the sonic energy inside the forest clearing, ensuring even coverage without overwhelming volume.

DJ’s maintained their familiar workflows, using their standard stereo output, while the Areal Engine handled the spatial transformation in real time. The result was an energetic, club-style sound that wrapped the crowd from all sides, maintaining constant pressure and clarity no matter where guests stood within the circular space.

Spectrum 360, underground energy in Area 404

Located inside Boomtown’s industrial-themed Area 404, Spectrum 360 is known for its fast, raw, high-energy techno programming.

For 2025, the stage was built with a Void Acoustics 6-point surround sound system, arranged in a full circle around the dancefloor, perfectly suited for a spatial audio approach.

Areal’s processing allowed the system to operate as a true 360° techno environment, where elements of the mix expanded into the room with depth, without compromising the tight punch required for high-tempo sets.

The upmix preserved the weight of the kick and bass in the front channels while adding atmosphere, detail, and width across the entire circle, giving the stage its signature enveloping rave energy.

Because Areal UPMIX ENGINE runs transparently with standard DJ gear, artists required no special setup, they simply played their sets, and the system took care of the immersive translation. This made Spectrum 360 one of Boomtown’s standout sonic experiences within Area 404.

SPECTRUM 360
loudspeakers - Void acoustics

configuration - Full circle

Built for festivals: ­
simple integration, scalable impact

Both Anara Forest and Spectrum 360 used existing loudspeaker infrastructures:

  • L-Acoustics Kara in a 6-point circular layout
  • Void Acoustics in a 6-point circular layout
The Areal UPMIX ENGINE connected directly into each stage’s signal chain as a plug-and-play upmix engine, requiring no changes to artists’ equipment, no custom routing complexity, and no separate immersive sound operator. Across both stages, Areal delivered:
  • Consistent coverage across the full dancefloor
  • Stronger sense of immersion without higher SPL
  • Efficient control of the soundfield in open natural spaces
  • A club-like 360° experience outdoors and at scale

Boomtown’s theatrical world-building makes it one of the most immersive festivals in Europe, and sound is a crucial part of that experience.

With Areal UPMIX ENGINE deployed across two very different environments, a forest clearing and an industrial underground arena, the festival demonstrated how spatial audio can enhance atmosphere, improve coverage, and elevate standard stereo DJ sets into a fully surrounding experience.

Areal helped both stages deliver a more engaging, more enveloping, and more memorable sound experience, perfectly aligned with Boomtown’s creative ambitions.

-Images provided by Boomtown Fair (UK) –