What if your home had a cinema, a workspace, a meditation space, a club, or even a concert hall? Well, according to speak manufacturer L-Acoustics, thanks to its Hyperreal Immersive Sound Spaces (HYRISS) audio system, that’s exactly what you can have–and it can all be the same room.
Let’s be clear, this tech isn’t anything like the dubious DSP settings your home receiver might offer, (Club, Concert, Bathroom etc)—settings you might experiment with once or twice and then never touch again; HYRISS, is an entirely different audio prospect. For one, having got to experience it in person at its London demo room, I can confirm two things. One, it actually works, and second, you probably can’t afford it.
This is because HYRISS is not just a set of speakers, it’s a solution that encapsulates speakers, electronics, room treatment, and careful application of design and architecture. Whether designing a room from the ground or retrofitting, either in a home or a commercial setting, it will be a significant project. This is very much a “well, if sir has to ask” type of scenario.
The Line Array Originators
Before we go on though, you might be wondering who L-Acoustics is. It’s an audio brand that even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve probably heard it: it provides speakers for live events, from stadium concerts to theater shows the world over.
The brand came to prominence with the launch of its line array system in 1992, which is consider the first high-quality outdoor audio system. Before this, outdoor sound wasn’t great. Going back to the 1960s, it’s well known that one of the reasons that The Beatles stopped touring was that they were unable to hear themselves play: the screams of the audience completely overwhelmed the feeble sound of the amplifiers and speakers of the day. In the ’70s and ’80s, this lack of volume was dealt with by sonic brute force—stacking huge speakers on top of each other. However, it was only when L-Acoustics founder Dr Christian Heil applied science to the problem that was he able to do something about this.
As a young man, Dr Heil was a physics graduate working in the field of elementary particles at the CERN in Switzerland. As he explained to me at the demo event in London, much to his frustration, he understood that he was never going to become a great physicist, but after listening to the bad sound at a concert realized that he knew enough about physics that he could do something about it.
After asked him to tell me more about what this was, Dr Heil was kind enough to explain it to me, but, much like poorly-directed 1980s concert audio, the science mostly went over my head. Suffice to say, he and his team devised a way to better control the dispersion of sound over long distances. This had three core benefits for the industry. First, the sound engineer could mix live audio with a high level of intelligibility; secondly, costs were reduced for the concert producer as fewer speakers were required, and third, the audience could actually hear! It was a significant benefit for L-Acoustics too, he told me, as it helped it sell a lot of speaker systems. Today, virtually all public outdoor systems from all brands use a similar technique to that first line array.
Making The Space Change
Having established its credentials, we can return to the L-Acoustics demo room in Highgate, North London, where Scott Sugden, the company director of product management demoed the HYRISS system to the group. Sugden explained that the concept behind HYRISS was to make a listening space, whether a room in the home or a hall in a hotel, sound exactly the way you need it to be, depending on what you are playing.
Its London demo room is large and well-appointed, with several sofas at one end in front of a large TV on one wall, a baby grand piano in the middle, and a solid-looking table and chairs at the other. However, TV aside, one thing we could not see was any visible technology.
However, with a press on the iPad and suddenly the Birds, a track by Dominique Fils-Aimé filled the room. The moody and sparse production has air and space between deep bass beats and this was presented powerfully and clearly, with crisp highs, an effortless mid-range crisp and a low-end that was visceral, yet nuanced.
Then the audio abruptly moved to the other end of the room entirely, and then with another tweak on the iPad controller, the vocals were brought to the one end and the bass moved off to one side. What was amazing was not so much that HYRISS could do this, but that somehow it didn’t make it unlistenable.
Sugden explained that HYRISS lets you adapt the music as you wish, in real time. It means you can be as involved in the music as you wish. You can make it background music or bring it to the fore. It also has practical benefits. You can lay out the furniture in the room as you want without having to worry where the speakers are; as they’re everywhere.
Next, a forest soundscape appeared all around us. We were told it was from a two-channel source, but as we walked around the room different sounds inside the track could be picked out. It felt as if we were walking through a tree-lined glade; I could imagine the sun streaming in through the leaves even though I was inside.
Then, the door opened, and a lady walked in and sat down at the piano. This, we were told was Belle Chen, a world-renowned concert pianist. It’s not often I see a world-class pianist perform, let alone sit right next to one, so that was a first.
However, after tinkling a few of the ivories she stopped and, as Sugden pointed out, hearing a piano played inside a home is never the same as hearing one played in a concert hall. However, after making an alteration Chen began to play in full flow—and suddenly sounded as if were playing in a concert hall, with echo and reverb imbuing the performance with the staging it deserved.
Other demos followed, such as live classical music recordings that sounded bombastically large and powerful, yet with precision and poise.
On the TV came we were treated to the classic clip from the recent Bradley Cooper remake of A Star Is Born, where Lady Gaga’s character sings live on stage with Cooper for the first time; initially coy, then confident. It undoubtedly sounded better than when I saw it in the local cinema.
As Dr Heil said to me later; “I think sound, music, and spaces deserve to treat our ears in a better way,” and the showroom demo was an impressive demonstration of that.
Mixing The Ingredients
So how does HYRISS work? The demo room contained 60 hidden speakers with 60,000 Watts of power amplification but making the magic happen are the combination of three L-Acoustics technologies: L-ISA, Anima, and Ambiance.
L-ISA is its real-time positional audio tech, which places it around the room so it can be heard and appreciated without there needing to be a “sweet spot”–artists such as Adele used it in their shows. Anima is the de-mixing tech that isolates sounds, whatever the source and allows them to be moved around the room as you wish.
Then there’s Ambiance, which is what enables the system to change the acoustic properties of the room taking the sound from multiple microphones and processing it to alter the output of the speakers. It’s a similar concept to the room-correction systems that many home receivers now offer but instead used to create room-changing effects.
However, it’s not just a case of the electronics, the room itself must be designed to work with it. As such, each HYRISS system will be a bespoke creation, involving close collaboration between designers, architects, and L-Acoustics’s sound engineers.
Having designed and implemented a relatively modest dedicated home cinema space in my own house, also with hidden front speakers behind a projection screen and acoustic treatment, I certainly got what L-Acoustics was going for – and indeed has achieved. This is next-level immersive audio. I was reassured that while manipulating audio is a core part of what the system does, when playing a movie, it leaves the original audio untouched so you can enjoy what is, hopefully, a well-designed audio mix. The system can also be integrated with professional automation control products, such as Q-SYS, Crestron, and others.
While my first, knowing, encounter with L-Acoustics left me enthralled, I had to ask Dr Heil why he felt space-changing tech such as HYRISS was important. “You know, you cannot play rock and roll in a cathedral. You cannot play the organ in a dry room. It doesn’t work. So, we have to adapt that. We have now the technologies to address that. It’s time.” Clearly, CERN’s loss is our gain.
