Mixing Mariah Carey Live in Dolby Atmos

Las Vegas, NV (March 19, 2026)—It might seem odd to read about Christmas concerts after the holiday season, but Mariah Carey’s recent Christmastime in Las Vegas residency was the kind of show people talk about for months after anyway. Packed with the songstress’ trademark hits and a sleigh full of Christmas classics, the 11-show run was held inside Dolby Live, the Atmos-outfitted theater at Park MGM on the Las Vegas Strip, and mixing the show nightly in immersive was Grammy-winning recording/mixing engineer Paul Falcone.

Carey began playing the venue in 2024 with her The Celebration of Mimi residency; a hit right out of the box, the show kept getting extended to meet demand, ultimately resulting in 46 shows across three runs. Word of mouth spread about the spectacle, and last summer saw the residency show adapted into an international concert tour that played China, Australia and multiple stops throughout Asia before wrapping up in November at Japan’s K-Arena Yokohama. Keeping the momentum going, Carey and Company switched gears within days, kicking off the Las Vegas Christmas residency that same month.

While the international tour made use of a traditional touring system from Clair Global based around Cohesion P.A. elements, the Las Vegas residencies gave Falcone the rare opportunity to mix live in Dolby Atmos.

Falcone’s studio career has seen him work on projects for everyone from Michael Jackson and Missy Elliott to R.E.M., Jay-Z and A$AP Rocky, while his broadcast work has seen him involved with World News Tonight, ABC News Live and the music crew of Good Morning America. When the opportunity to mix the Celebration of Mimi residency came up, Falcone jumped at the chance to use both his studio and live mixing skills inside the unique Vegas venue.

Dolby Live opened in 2021 with an Atmos-enabled audio system designed, calibrated and tuned by Dolby engineers to accommodate the size and specific acoustics of the theater. Placed around the venue are 402 L-Acoustics speakers—largely K2s—used to cover the 5,200 seats across the Orchestra, High Orchestra and Balcony levels; the furthest seat is only 145 feet from the 140-footwide stage.

“When I got to do the residency, the Dolby team was awesome,” Falcone recalls. “I showed up wanting to get highly experimental, and my system engineer at the time and the Dolby team system engineer also wanted to; we were like, ‘All right, let’s see what we can do with this!’ And they were very supportive—when we were learning how to [mix immersive], any open time that we needed in the theater, we got; it was great.”

Dolby Live’s house Atmos system is typically run via a custom GUI on an iPad that lets users control status snapshots of Atmos objects in the mix, but there are other options available. “They said, ‘If your playback guy is running Pro Tools, you can drive it dynamically using the Dolby Atmos Music Panner in Pro Tools,” Falcone remembers. “I said, ‘Well, my playback guy doesn’t use Pro Tools, but I do,’ so I started driving the Dolby system, locked to time code, using Pro Tools instead of using their iPad panner.”

Mixing immersive in a studio setting is often an exercise in restraint, and to a great extent, says Falcone, the same rules apply to live spatial audio. “Now, this isn’t an Avengers movie; I didn’t have objects flying around,” he jokes, “but sometimes there was a gimmick we wanted to pan around the room, or we wanted things to get wider as the song progressed, or we wanted the panning to change from song to song in an easy way. Using Pro Tools with the built-in Music Panner—now it has native Dolby panning but originally we had the Music Panner plugin— was fantastic. It was an easy workflow that allowed me to get what I wanted quickly and be able to drive the system dynamically; we were the first people to do that.”

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Falcone mixed the residencies on a DiGiCo Quantum 5 console, and ran both redundant UAD and Apple MainStage. Throughout the show, snapshots tied to time code were used to ensure all console and effect settings were changed as needed. He explains, “When you’re working with an artist like Mariah, whose career spans decades, you have hits from record to record that sound kind of different—but we have to make a cohesive live show, so the sound of the drums, for instance, has to change from song to song.”

While the Celebration of Mimi residency and international tour had similar setlists, the Christmastime in Las Vegas shows by necessity had a very different feel, kicking off with holiday classics before shifting to a mini set of material from Carey’s latest album, Here For It All, followed by a blizzard of big hits and the inevitable finale of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” With the holiday residency beginning right on the heels of the international tour, however, the turnaround time to develop new live Atmos mixes was short and intense. “It was quick, but we got through it,” says Falcone. “Having that Pro Tools rig driving Atmos, plus having my console file already defined a bit, helped speed up the process immensely.

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“Here’s the cool thing about mixing the Christmas residency: People always talk about using Atmos to place things in the mix that you couldn’t easily place in stereo, but if I’m mixing in stereo, I’m always, ‘Oh, we’ll find a way to place it.’ It doesn’t seem that difficult—that’s mixing, right? Anyway, these mixes always start in stereo, and then we branch them out into Atmos. I heard the [Christmas songs’] stereo mixes, but when we put them into Atmos, the definition that we got in Dolby Live was, ‘Wow—I’m really hearing these as layers!’ The content for the Christmas show really lent itself to big, Atmos, theater moments—it was a really cool sound!”