Five stages and a circular dance floor: L-Acoustics' sound deployment at Nameless Festival

Milano Show Rent, an L-Acoustics Certified Provider, supplied K Series systems for all stages at Italy's Nameless Festival, where the Red Bull Energy Zone became the first festival stage in Europe to feature an L-Acoustics DJ spatial sound system.

Nameless Festival began in 2013 as a party organised by a group of friends at the Bione sports centre in Lecco, with a single stage. Thirteen years and three venues later, it returned to the same site as one of Italy's leading electronic music events.

Held from 30 May to 1 June 2026, the festival welcomed more than 90,000 attendees and over 100 artists across four stages, with Calvin Harris, John Summit and FISHER headlining.

One brand on every technical rider

Nameless production director Angelo Loizzi set a clear brief: L-Acoustics systems on all five stages, including the smallest. The festival has its own FOH and system engineers, so the technical specifications were defined directly by the professionals responsible for operating the equipment.

We wanted L-Acoustics on every stage because it is the preferred brand among both our artists and technicians. It consistently appears as the first choice on technical riders, as touring professionals know its systems well and particularly appreciate their low-frequency performance for electronic music, explains Loizzi.

Milano Show Rent supplied the systems and provided technical crews for all five stages, while Nico Berna, technical and lighting designer at Black Box, handled the stage and sound coverage design alongside Jacopo Naso from the Nameless production team.

"At Nameless 2026, our collaboration with the team reached a new level", says Amaury Froiio, project manager and owner of Milano Show Rent. "We were delighted to handle the entire audiovisual and lighting production for all five stages using our own in-house resources".

Spatial sound on a 360-degree stage

The Red Bull Energy Zone, headlined by Defected, Glitterbox and CRUNCH, was conceived as a circular dance floor offering an immersive sound experience.

"Our audience comes for house and club music, and that music is designed to be felt from every direction", explains Loizzi. "Once we decided that the Red Bull Energy Zone would have a circular layout, a stereo system no longer made sense for that space".

Working from Berna's stage design, Milano Show Rent and L-Acoustics sound engineer Rafael Pereira developed a system for a circular truss structure measuring 16 metres in diameter, with six towers integrating audio and lighting equipment and surrounding the dance floor with spatialised sound.

"The dance floor and circular structure had already been defined when we joined the project", explains Amaury. "Our job, together with Rafael, was to make the sound match the visual impact of that configuration. That was the space where we integrated L-Acoustics DJ".

L-Acoustics DJ combines the L-Acoustics ecosystem of loudspeakers, electronics and software with a control interface located in the DJ booth, accessible via an iPad or the L-Acoustics DJ Controller.

At the heart of the system is a low-latency machine-learning technology that separates stereo music into individual stems in real time and routes them to the spatial mixing engine. This allows beats, basslines, melodies and vocals to be positioned and moved throughout the space.

The system is compatible with both digital and analogue DJ setups, without requiring changes to existing equipment or mixing techniques. Artists can control the spatial mix themselves or work alongside a spatial audio engineer.

L-Acoustics DJ has a very short learning curve. Even DJs unfamiliar with the technology can learn to use it in very little time. We were also pleased to see that a large majority, approximately 80%, embraced it enthusiastically, adds Amaury. 

Controlling coverage and sound spill into surrounding areas

The site had to be assessed as though it were an entirely new location. It was essential to prevent sound from reaching the buildings directly behind the main stage. This was one of the reasons why the main flown systems used K1 above K1-SB, with subwoofers in a cardioid configuration, to focus acoustic energy on the audience area. With no suitable locations available for delay towers, the entire depth of the audience area had to be covered from the stage itself.

The Nameless Tent, facing the main stage, required sound spill to be controlled in both directions. In addition, its structural characteristics ruled out the installation of heavy flown systems. The audio crew installed all five systems over two days as part of a ten-day overall build carried out alongside Stageco, and completed the load-out in a single night.

Soundvision served as the shared reference tool for the teams. Berna's team provided vector drawings and SketchUp files to system engineer Luigi Vargiolo, who created the Soundvision projects for three stages.

"This year, we had eight people on the audio crew, and all of them were proficient Soundvision users," explains Berna. "We share the file, hold a brief meeting before load-in, and everyone can see their own part of the project. This speeds up both load-in and load-out and provides the starting point for making the necessary adjustments according to wind and weather conditions on site."

Four stages, five system designs

The main Ploom Stage featured twelve K1 and two K2 per side, flown beneath six K1-SB, along with 48 KS28 subwoofers groundstacked in a cardioid configuration across the front of the stage. The Live stage featured four K1-SB and twelve K2 per side, together with 16 KS28. The Garnier Fructis Arena used ten K2 per side and 16 KS28 in a cardioid configuration. Meanwhile, the Red Bull Energy Zone incorporated Kara II and A15 systems distributed across seven arrays around the 16-metre circular structure, accompanied by eight KS28. The Heineken Stage used a scaled-down Kara II and A15 configuration. Kara II and SB18 systems provided monitoring on every stage, while the entire installation used LA12X amplified controllers. Overall, the deployment included more than 80 K2, over 100 KS28 and 24 K1.

L-Acoustics DJ allowed us to offer a stage unlike anything at any other festival in Italy. In addition, having systems from the same brand on every stage for the first time meant our artists and technicians never had to worry about the sound. All of this helped make Nameless 2026 one of the most successful editions of the festival to date, says Loizzi.