L-Acoustics DJ Puts Spatial Audio in the Booth at Beatport Live LA 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 headquarters in the downtown Los Angeles Arts District. "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. "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." "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." 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 creative collaboration 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-Gael 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." 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. "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." 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." 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, visit www.beatport.com. 
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