How L-ISA Immersive Audio Solved the Sound Challenges of The Rise

When choreographer and director Romain Rachline Borgeaud set out to stage *The Rise* — a post-apocalyptic musical featuring 34 dancer-vocalists, industrial percussion, and symphonic orchestration — at Zénith-format venues seating 4,000 to 6,000, he faced a sound problem that conventional speaker towers couldn’t solve. The kinetic multi-level set, with its trapdoors and moving platforms, left no room for side hangs. And the score, stacked with 34 live voices over dense pre-recorded beds, needed clarity at contained SPL levels in sealed arenas.

RB Productions’ answer was L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound, deployed by lead FOH Engineer Arnaud Bayssat and system engineer Pierre-Louis Charles. Bayssat, who has worked with L-Acoustics for two decades, noted that L-ISA’s object-based approach offered “the unmasking capability I needed to handle such a dense mix” — separating individual voices in the spatial field rather than piling them through a conventional stereo bus.

The system at the Dôme de Paris was built around five hangs, each comprising one L2 and one L2D, with six KS28 subwoofers in cardioid configuration flown centrally. Soundvision modeling confirmed 88% of seats would receive consistent level and tonal balance, with 98.8% of the audience within useful coverage. An L-ISA Processor II handled all real-time object-based rendering, running on a fully redundant Milan-AVB network.

Bayssat developed his L-ISA pre-encoding workflow on a smaller studio rig, and when the system scaled to the full venue rig, the sessions translated exactly. The show continues with a full Paris season in March 2027 and a national Zénith tour that autumn.

For systems engineers facing a similar brief — dense vocal content, architectural constraints on speaker placement, venues that punish uncontrolled SPL — the L-ISA deployment on *The Rise* is a useful reference: spatial separation over conventional gain structure.

[Read the full piece](https://www.tpimagazine.com/l-acoustics-l-isa-immerses-audiences-in-the-rise/)