“Sometimes it takes a grand madness to have the vision to build a place that we’ve never experienced before,” Bono said of Sphere in late 2023 when his band, U2, opened the technological marvel in the desert.

Sometimes it also takes a boatload of cash.

The grand madman behind the 360-foot wonder on the Strip is billionaire James Dolan (owner of the New York Knicks and Madison Square Garden), who didn't blink when the construction costs of Sphere ballooned from the original estimate of $1.2 billion to what ended up totaling $2.3 billion before the first note was plucked.

Why did it cost Dolan, the son of billionaire Cablevision pioneer Charles Dolan who founded HBO, so much money?

In part because of the attention to detail needed to make every part of the visual and auditory experience - inside and out of the revolutionary building - state-of-the art.

Let's start with it's size.

Sphere is so tall they could have built it around the Statue of Liberty and still have extra room. It's as wide as the playing field of Dodger Stadium.

At 875,000 square feet, that's more than 2.5x the area of The Forum in LA, which Dolan owned up until recently.

Now the visuals. If you've bought a TV recently you probably upgraded to a flatscreen with 4K. You may have seen some very expensive sets that boast 8k for even better clarity.

Sphere broadcasts in a mind-blowing wrap-around 16K powered by 160,000 square feet of curved LED screens. That is why when you see videos from the inside, it looks like nothing you've ever seen before.

So when Bono sang, "I'm ready for what's next" in 1991's "Zoo Station" during their Zoo TV Tour, it was this that he manifested more than three decades later.

Achtung baby, indeed.

Hidden behind those screens is the crystal clear sound system.

The 1,600 speakers not only deliver remarkable sound thanks to 3D Audio-Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis technologies.

But that sound can be pinpointed to specific locations within the venue so if one part of the place wanted to hear in Spanish and another part wanted to hear it in French: voilà. No problemo.

And the seats can move.

And from inside those seats, like in 5D movie theaters, appropriate scents can be emitted to add to the experience.

All those things combined are what made it "impossibly attractive" to Dead & Company's Bob Weir who got the band back together just 14 months after Dead & Co. wrapped up their "Final Tour" so he could experience Sphere from his favorite place: the stage.

Was it worth it?

Ask Setlist's Jon O'Hara, who upon seeing one of the shows last May wrote, "164,000 speakers may seem like a lot, but hearing is believing, and the believing was jaw-dropping.

"The amount of audible detail made the experience of listening to Dead & Company even more joyful, revealing subtleties in musical exchanges that we otherwise would have missed," he explained.

All of that is what happens inside.

The outside of the Sphere, known as the Exosphere, is the largest LED screen on Earth. Something they claim can be seen from space.

It's an audacious 580,000 square feet of vivid, programmable lights that in the right or wrong hands can be the greatest billboard imaginable. An unprecedented 1.2 million puck-shaped LEDs make up the skin of this bad boy, each one packing 48 teeny diodes capable of cranking out more than 250 million colors.

It is merely the canvas from which creativity can go hog wild. The exosphere can flash everything from massive eyeballs to full-on animated fireworks shows that you can see from the Strip or an airplane window. Some Vegas visitors just sit in their hotel room and watch.

Yes, the Dead can be trippy, but the outside of the Sphere is a trip of its own.

In the year and a half that it's been open, just a handful of groups have rocked the joint. U2 played for 40 nights. By the end of this month Dead & Co. will tie that number with their Dead Forever residency at the Sphere.

The Eagles have played there 32 times now, but then there's a huge drop-off. Because Phish is committed to having every show be totally different, they only performed at Sphere four times because the visuals take so much time to develop.

Because many things are about quality over quantity, it only took one night in the Sphere seeing Phish for Drew Carey to declare, "Bro, I met God tonight for real."

So yes, according to Drew, it was worth it for Mr. Dolan to shell out a billion more than he expected to bring the Sphere to life.

Bless that grand madness.

Will fans of Kenny Chesney and the Backstreet Boys have similar religious experiences during their respective residencies later this year?

One thing we've learned so far: you shouldn't underestimate the Sphere.

Tickets for those shows, along with upcoming dates by Eagles and Dead & Co are available on the Sphere's website.

Other Venue Spotlights: The Apollo Theater, Aragon Ballroom, The Bluebird Cafe, First Avenue, The Fillmore, The Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood Palladium, KIA Forum, Madison Square Garden, Massey Hall, The Metro, Nippon Budokan, O2 Arena, O2 Academy Brixton, Pappy & Harriet's Palace, Radio City Music Hall, Red Rocks, Royal Albert Hall, The Ryman Auditorium, The Sphere, Stubb's Bar-B-Q, Sydney's Qudos Bank Arena, The Whisky, 9:30 Club