Disney’s Upfront is not one single show. The 2026 edition, staged at the North Javits Center on May 12, opened with Anne Hathaway introducing new CEO Josh D’Amaro, ran an ESPN college football desk live from house left, played film and series trailers at cinema level, put more than 100 names on stage across entertainment, sports, streaming and film, and closed with Olivia Rodrigo playing a full musical set. A corporate presentation, a broadcast segment, a trailer reel and a concert, back to back, in the same room and on the same system.
Holding all of that together on one system was only half the job. The room was the other half, and the harder one. The North Javits space is wide, tall and hard-surfaced, and reverberance is the obstacle every Upfront team meets there—particularly for speech intelligibility, which a presentation of this kind lives or dies on. “We’ve done some dampening there in the past, but it’s still very difficult,” says Nick Sarlo, Head of Audio at NMR Events, the production company that supplied and ran the event’s audio.
Bob McGlinchey, NMR Events’ Lead Audio Design Engineer and working his fourth Upfront for Disney, states the brief plainly: movie-theater sound quality for the content, and a speech PA intelligible in every seat. “We’re doing a combo of making a big theater system and having a great presentation stage,” he says.
NMR Events’ answer, designed with support from the L-Acoustics Application team, was a full-surround L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal system, signed off after a demonstration for Disney executives at L-Acoustics’ Westlake Village facility in California. It is the first L-ISA system deployed at a Disney Upfront. The design gave every style of content the same spatial treatment. “We were able to make people’s eyes and ears connect here,” McGlinchey says.
Designing a Wide Frontal L-ISA System for North Javits
The design started from the shape of the room. Stereo across a stage that wide means repeating left and right along the front, which flattens the image and leaves the audience with no sense of where anything is. L-Acoustics Global Application Lead, Spatial Systems Oscar Sturup proposed a very wide frontal L-ISA configuration instead, so that any source could be placed where it belonged on stage.
That paid off most visibly on the ESPN segment. With the college football desk set up house left, the broadcast audio was placed house left too, and it reached the room from where the presenters were actually sitting. For the trailers, flying the subwoofers centrally beneath the center Scene hang kept the low end time-aligned to the stage, so cinematic content landed evenly across the hall rather than in pockets.
Seven Kara II Scene Arrays, Extensions and a Full Rear Surround Layer
Drawn from NMR Events’ L-Acoustics inventory, the L-ISA Scene system comprised seven arrays of eight Kara II flown across the wide stage, with Extension arrays of eight Kara II to the far left and right of them. Low frequency came from two centrally flown adjacent hangs of four KS28 each in cardioid configuration, paired with three more KS28 in a line in front of center stage below.
Out-fill arrays of eight Kara II per side were flown between the Scene and Extension systems, with smaller arrays of six Kara II out in the room for far left- and right-side delay. The surround layer comprised six rear arrays of six Kara II. Eleven coaxial X8 in an arc along the lip of the main stage carried spatialized front-fill, with six more X8, three per side outboard of them, as mono front-fills. LA12X amplified controllers powered the system, with a pair of LA7.16 driving the spatialized front-fills, while an L-ISA Processor II handled the object-based mix.
One L-ISA Configuration, Four Styles of Show
An Upfront sits between genres. It is part corporate presentation, part product launch, part broadcast, part theater, and this year part concert, and the audio has to carry all of it without the room appearing to change character. Adrian D. Rivas, brought in by NMR Events as L-ISA systems engineer, set out to let the audience have the most organic immersive experience possible across the whole running order.
Part of that was fidelity to the source. Content mixed in 5.1 for cinema or broadcast was played back in the room in 5.1 rather than folded down. “With L-ISA, from an audio perspective, we were able to faithfully reproduce and present that original content to the audience in the room the way it was intended to be heard,” Rivas says.
The rest was consistency of seat. Wherever an audience member sat, the intent was a fifth-row-center experience, with every element still arriving from where it sat on stage. “The audience absolutely had an experience that sounded more natural, specifically because of how the system was designed,” Rivas says. “But there were also times that, because of the style of production we were trying to achieve, I feel we exceeded just immersive sound, and really made it an immersive moment.”
L-ISA Localization Answers the Room’s Reverberance
Localization turned out to double as acoustic treatment. Holding the spoken voice at the center, instead of spreading it across arrays that reach each seat at a different moment, removed the competing arrivals that make the hall difficult in the first place.
“Being able to have the vocal just come from the center and not have to fight different areas and arrival times was huge,” McGlinchey says. “L-ISA solved that issue entirely with being able to localize to where that voice is. And then, once we got to the music part, having that much PA working together in that way made the sound huge without having a million different arrival times. That capability alone solved almost all of our reverberance issues.”
Designing the Next Upfront Around L-ISA
Disney’s 2026 Upfront closed with Jimmy Kimmel and his daughter, Jane, introducing Olivia Rodrigo for the final performance. It went well enough sonically that the conversation for next year has already moved on from running a show through an immersive processor to designing the show around immersive sound from the start, Sarlo says. “Possibly adapt the show itself to an immersive system,” he says. “Actually map out everything in the L-ISA Studio at L-Acoustics Westlake, or even a scaled system in our warehouse in New Jersey. Now that would really be something.”
For more details on Disney’s 2026 Upfront, visit www.disneyadvertising.com/upfront. NMR Events can be found online at www.nmrevents.com.
Please visit L-Acoustics at www.l-acoustics.com.
