As live events continue to explore more immersive ways of engaging audiences, sound is increasingly moving beyond the traditional left-and-right speaker setup. At Forbidden Forest 2026 in the UK, the Arcadia Spider offered a practical example of how live music can be designed around an audience rather than simply projected towards it.
The tenth edition of Forbidden Forest took place at Belvoir Castle near Grantham, bringing more than 50 artists across six stages and multiple electronic music genres. For its anniversary edition, the festival introduced Arcadia’s 50-tonne Spider as a centrepiece, creating a 360° performance environment in which audiences surrounded the structure rather than facing a conventional front-of-stage PA.
That physical arrangement presented a very different audio challenge. Conventional festival sound systems are generally designed around a defined audience area in front of the stage, with left and right speaker arrays creating a stereo image. Arcadia’s Spider, by contrast, places the audience around the performance space, making consistent coverage across the full circle a much more complex proposition.
For Forbidden Forest, the Spider used a nine-point L-Acoustics system, deployed around the structure by AF Live. The configuration was designed to support the Spider’s 360° performance environment, where there was no single conventional listening position.
The challenge with stereo DJ content
The complication was that DJs were still supplying music in a format familiar to almost every live music production: stereo.
A standard DJ mix is created for left and right channels. Simply distributing those two channels across a circular speaker system does not automatically create a coherent 360° experience. Depending on where an audience member is standing, the balance and spatial relationship between the two channels can change significantly.
This is where Areal Technologies’ Upmix Engine became part of the system.
At Forbidden Forest, the technology was used to help translate conventional stereo DJ content across Arcadia’s nine-point L-Acoustics system. Crucially, this could be done while retaining stereo content at the source, meaning artists and DJs did not have to change the way they prepared or delivered their sets.
The approach illustrates an important development in immersive live sound: rather than requiring every artist to create a separate immersive mix, technology can be introduced into the production chain to adapt existing content to a multi-speaker environment.
Moving from a stereo image to a sound field
The difference between conventional stereo and a 360° system is not simply about adding more speakers.
In a traditional setup, the sound field is fundamentally built around a front-facing perspective. In a circular environment, the system has to consider the audience from multiple directions simultaneously. The objective is to create a more consistent sonic experience as people move around the performance space.
Areal describes its technology as being designed to render omnidirectional sound environments, positioning spatial sound as a creative medium rather than simply an extension of conventional stereo playback.
The Upmix Engine is particularly relevant to live events because it addresses one of the practical barriers to immersive sound: the huge amount of existing content that is still produced in stereo.
Areal has positioned real-time upmixing as a way of bridging traditional stereo workflows and immersive multi-speaker systems without changing the original stereo mix. The company has also demonstrated the technology in other immersive environments where venues receive stereo content from touring productions and guest engineers.
Why this matter for festivals?
The Arcadia deployment demonstrates how immersive audio can become part of a festival production without completely rebuilding the artist workflow.
For the audience, the change is largely experiential. Instead of the sound being anchored to a front-facing stage, the audio system is designed around the physical environment itself. The result is a sound field that supports the Spider’s circular performance format and allows the audience to experience the show from different positions around the installation.
For production teams, however, the significance is more technical. A large-scale immersive system needs to work with the realities of live music: artists arrive with existing show files, DJs bring stereo mixes, schedules are tight and the system must operate reliably in a constantly changing environment.
The Forbidden Forest deployment therefore becomes an interesting case study in the transition from immersive audio as a specialised format to immersive audio as part of mainstream live production.
Areal’s recent work reflects this direction. At PLASA Show 2026, the company’s commercial director Kristof Jeuris presented “Upmixing: A Practical Path to Mainstream Live Immersive Audio”, drawing on deployments involving Arcadia, Tomorrowland and Boomtown. The central idea was that immersive systems do not necessarily need to demand an entirely new content workflow.
The next layer of live-event immersion
The evolution of festival production has traditionally been visible through increasingly complex stages, lighting, video, pyrotechnics and physical structures. Audio is now becoming another part of that immersive architecture.
Arcadia has long treated sound as an integral part of its spectacle. At Forbidden Forest, the combination of the Spider’s physical design, its circular audience configuration and a nine-point L-Acoustics system created the conditions for a different approach to live sound. The addition of Areal’s Upmix Engine addressed the gap between that immersive environment and the stereo content typically supplied by DJs.
The significance of the deployment lies less in simply having “more speakers” and more in changing the relationship between audience, stage and sound.
As festivals increasingly experiment with spatial experiences, the question is no longer only how loud a performance can be or how clearly it can be heard from the front of a stage. It is also how sound can move with the architecture of an experience — and whether audiences can feel surrounded by the performance rather than simply positioned in front of it.
Forbidden Forest’s 2026 anniversary edition offered one example of that shift. With Arcadia’s Spider at its centre and immersive audio technology working behind the scenes, the festival demonstrated how 360° sound can move from an experimental concept towards a practical tool for large-scale live entertainment.
