The Eagles cement residency at the Sphere with noise reduction from Fourier Audio

With five number-one singles, six number-one albums, six Grammy Awards, and five American Music Awards, the Eagles are one of the most successful and enduring musical acts of all time. While they’ve had several forays on tour in recent years, the band has also had an ongoing residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas that began in September 2024 and is scheduled to conclude with a final set of shows ending on February 28, 2026. The campaign features a total of 52 performances, offering fans an immersive experience of the band’s music in the unique venue. The process of taking the Eagles’ show from the streets to the Sphere took some doing, and the transform.engine from Fourier Audio has played a major role in that.

Tom Evans has been mixing the band’s iconic sound on the road since 2017, including on their 2021 tour in which they performed the Hotel California album in its entirety with a full orchestra. The Eagles are all about their soaring, closely harmonized vocals, and getting Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Timothy B. Schmit, Vince Gill, and Deacon Frey just right night after night was the primary task. That became a bit more challenging when the Eagles embarked on their Sphere residency. There, the venue’s immersive 42 speaker zones included the main PA components set behind the stage, which Evans recognised as a potential issue.

“Because of the clever beam-forming physics that they’ve got going on in there, one of the artifacts that’s produced is a 4kHz lobe that hits the downstage edge,” he explained. “So not only is the PA behind the stage, it’s also squirting that extra 4k, which is a very unpleasant feedback frequency for vocal microphones, right at the vocal microphones.”

Evans consulted with colleagues who had previously mixed shows there, including Derek Featherstone, who mixed Dead & Company during their Sphere residency. Among other solutions, he was introduced to the Fourier Audio transform.engine as the host for the McDSP NR800 noise-reduction plugin. “It’s a noise reduction plugin that lets you target specific problem frequencies and certain individual thresholds. And I figured the simplest way to integrate it with my SSL L550 Plus console would be the Fourier transform.engine. And it turned out to be just that.”

Evans took the transform.engine into the rehearsal space at the Sphere, which is designed to emulate the venue’s unique sonic characteristics, including the PA system behind the stage. Running the NR800 and a NF575 notch filter plugin, he found that he could easily manage the new audio challenges of the venue while keeping the carefully tuned sound of the band intact for the residency.

“Obviously, I have quite a few vocal mics on that stage, and I’m inserting the plugins through the transform.engine on the vocal channels, and the result has been excellent,” he said. “I’m able to maintain all of my settings on all of my outboard and other processing, but easily manage the Sphere itself, all with virtually no latency. I don’t have to do any significant temporal compensation. And because it integrates seamlessly into the workflow that I already had, it leaves the onboard tools to be more of the creative ones, whereas the plugins in the transform.engine can be more like the surgical, corrective side of the equation.”

He’s also been using it on the acoustic guitars. “There’s an awful lot of RF in that building and that affects specific frequencies on some of the models of pickups in the acoustic guitars," he said. “So using the notch filter to notch out exactly those frequencies proves very effective, and again with practically zero latency. The transform.engine has been a great addition to the setup here, in part because you never really know it’s there. It just works."