Photo above: Beatport Live LA recently opened with an L-Acoustics system installed by RAT Sound Systems, with Lumina Production Services handling audio production
Beatport has been the online home of dance music for more than 20 years, built by DJs and for DJs, and in recent years that identity has grown beyond the purely virtual into live events. Recently, the company gave that community an address, opening a performance space inside its own headquarters in the downtown Los Angeles Arts District. Beatport Live LA is free to attend, runs on a regular monthly cadence, and holds an audience close enough to the booth to watch an artist work. To make the space unique and give audiences the best experience possible, Beatport equipped it with a spatial audio system that few rooms of any size can offer.
“We wanted a physical space where we could show up in person for the culture we serve and be part of one of the most important parts of the ecosystem: the events,” says Ed Hill, Chief Brand Officer of Beatport. “Downtown LA gave us that opportunity, so we built a place where people can hear incredible music and make a deeper connection with the community.”
Sound Quality and Connection Over Spectacle
The Beatport team set out to build a space that would serve artists and fans equally, on a regular cadence, with no barriers to entry. Since launching, Beatport Live LA has drawn aspiring local DJs alongside globally recognized artists including SOFI TUKKER, Odd Mob, Beltran, SIDEPIECE, Aluna, and Kaleena Zanders. For the larger names the room works as an underplay, a space far smaller than they would normally fill, where a set can be built for an audience standing within arm’s reach of the decks.
“Part of our vision was to prioritize sound quality and connection over spectacle,” Hill says. “It’s not a festival stage or a mega-club, but rather a room where you can feel the music and see the DJs up close. That intimacy is the point.”
L-Acoustics DJ Spatializes the Sound of a Stereo Set
Beatport and L-Acoustics arrived at that room from the same direction. Beatport has spent two decades removing whatever stood between a DJ and the music they wanted to play, from a catalog no record shop could physically stock, to Beatport LINK in 2019, to a full DJ application running in a browser in 2021. L-Acoustics DJ removes a constraint of a different kind, and one that had gone largely unquestioned: that a DJ set is a stereo object.
Announced in May 2025 and shipping this year, L-Acoustics DJ uses machine-learning source separation to split a track into its component stems while it plays; drums, vocals and melodic parts can be positioned and moved anywhere in the room in real time. The separation happens live, on whatever the DJ cued up 30 seconds earlier.
At Beatport Live LA the control surface is an L-Acoustics DJ Controller and an iPad running the L-Acoustics DJ App, sitting beside the mixer where a visiting artist can reach it. A DJ who has never seen the system can use it on the night; one who wants to build a set around it can treat the whole room as an instrument. The same combination offered further collaboration creatively between the Beatport Live series in March 2026, and L-Acoustics DJ, when the WMC pool party in Miami ran L-Acoustics DJ across three days.
“Beatport built its business on giving artists tools that let them do something the previous format made impossible, and that is exactly what we set out to do with L-Acoustics DJ,” says Yann-Gaël Gicquel, Director of Product Management, Spatial Systems at L-Acoustics. “A DJ walks into this room with the set they were already going to play and leaves having mixed it in three dimensions, without changing a single thing about the way they work.”
A 6.1 System Built Around the L-Acoustics Ecosystem
The room runs a system anchored by two Syva over Syva Low flanking the DJ booth, and four X12 coaxial speakers hung on the sides and back of the audience area. Two KS21 subwoofers provide extended low end, while four X8 enclosures provide spatial sound to the DJ booth. The system is driven by two LA12X amplified controllers, powered by a P1 processor, and the L-Acoustics DJ technology is driven by an L-ISA Processor II core. RAT Sound System installed the system. Lumina Production Services handles audio production for the series and supported the room’s first fully spatial show in January 2026, when Kaleena Zanders, SIDEPIECE, and Aluna played it.
“When we set out to build this space, we knew that the sound system would define the entire experience,” Hill says. “So, L-Acoustics helped us design a system that’s perfectly calibrated for the dimensions and acoustics of our space. We can achieve the kind of clarity, depth, and power that you’d expect in a world-class club or concert venue, but in an intimate setting.”
“The response has been amazing,” Hill adds. “Artists keep telling us they love playing our room because the system sounds incredible, and the crowd is genuinely there for the music.” The series has built something local as well: “We’ve seen a real community forming around our music series, people who come back every month, who’ve made friends there, who treat it as their local. That’s exactly what we wanted.”
Streaming Beyond the Room
The room was never meant to be the whole audience. Beatport livestreams the series, in binaural audio, to a community that spans every continent. “As a company, we’ve been livestreaming events for the past few years, so this was always part of the plan to include this dimension. Our community spans every continent, so if we were going to create a physical experience, we had an obligation to make sure it wasn’t exclusive to the people who happen to live in LA,” Hill explains. “It also serves a deeper strategic purpose by creating permanent content that lives on our platforms, extending the life of each and every event we host.”
A Global Blueprint
Beatport plans to extend the success of Beatport Live LA while keeping its original location as the heartbeat of the series. “The vision was always for Beatport Live to be a global format, a portable standard of quality that we can deploy in any city where the culture is alive,” says Hill, with other cities to follow. In each case, sound is the variable that decides everything else. “It’s the single most important variable in any dance music experience. You can have the right DJ, the right crowd and the right energy, but if the sound system isn’t up to par, then people like me will be complaining from the middle of the dancefloor, boring everyone to tears, which is no good for anyone,” Hill concludes.
For more information on Beatport Live LA, please visit www.beatport.com. More information on RAT Sound Systems can be found at www.ratsound.com, and on Lumina Production Services at www.luminaeventlighting.com. Please visit L-Acoustics at www.l-acoustics.com.
