Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.December’s reopening of the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris following the fire of 2019 was all about visual spectacle, from the rejuvenated stonework to the golden reliquary that houses the Crown Of Thorns. But hidden among the grooves of the fluted pillars lurked an array of invisible loudspeakers, all connected to a bespoke sound system installed by French audio firm L-Acoustics. “And some of the speakers that you can’t see in Notre-Dame are the same ones that you can’t see in this room,” says L-Acoustics’ Mary Beth Henson. We’re standing in a showroom at the firm’s north-London HQ, and the absence of audio equipment is, as Henson notes, conspicuous. L-Acoustics calls the room a Hyriss – a Hyperreal Immersive Sound Space: its purpose is to provide the ultimate experience of sound. Behind the bespoke green cloth-covered panelling on the wall sit multiple sets of speakers spaced about a metre and a half apart, with an additional grid of 12 discreetly embedded in the ceiling.Even without music playing, the room itself sounds extraordinary – sweetly reverberant. This is a space whose every sonic characteristic can be controlled; if you want it to sound like a cathedral, or a bathroom, or a small concert hall, you can. If you want it to function as a cinema room with 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound, a karaoke booth, a sub-bass heavy nightclub or just an acoustically resonant space to sit and play piano in, that can happen with the tap of a button. And this isn’t just a proof of concept; any room larger than 45sq m can be transformed into a Hyriss by L-Acoustics, in consultation with an architect or interior designer (from about €3,550 per square metre).Christian played some music and said, ‘I think I’ve just created the world’s best hi-fi system’All the technology behind it, from the engineering of the speakers to the algorithms spreading the sound throughout the room, was forged in the world of live music. As a young man, L-Acoustics’ founder, Christian Heil, was inspired to shift from his background in particle physics into professional audio after attending a Pink Floyd show where the band was experimenting with quadrophonic sound, an early manifestation of spatial audio. By 1992, he and his firm had produced the first line array, a vertically mounted, gently curved arrangement of speakers which is now a familiar sight at arena and festival shows, but back then was revolutionary. In 2016, the firm created L-ISA (pronounced “Eliza”), an immersive audio tool that allows artists to create spatial soundscapes. “You’re standing in the room where L-ISA was developed and demonstrated,” says L-Acoustics’ director of home and yacht, Nick Fichte. “Christian played back some music and said, ‘You know, I think I’ve just created the world’s best hi-fi system’.” While the Hyriss’s extraordinary sound is no surprise, its flexibility is. A Dolby Atmos stream from Tidal is all-enveloping. Chest-thumping bass is a testament to the power of the sound system, but it can also render a John Williams orchestral piece (created using L-ISA) from the conductor’s perspective, with French horns, cellos and glockenspiel all distinct and spatially separated. Even music in bog-standard stereo can, with L-Acoustics technology, be spread out across the room, with AI detecting guitars, drums and vocals in real time and giving them their own space. I was briefly indulged and allowed to listen to some music that I’d had a hand in making; hi-fi buffs often make bold claims that certain speakers allow you to hear very specific elements of recorded music with a new clarity, but this was the real deal.Investing in a surround-sound setup is traditionally a gruelling business: buying the elements of a 5.1 or 7.1 system, positioning them in a room, perpetually wondering whether they’re in quite the right place and tweaking the setup accordingly. And all that effort in the service of just one position in the room, the so-called “sweet spot”, where everything sounds just right. “Hyriss partly came out of Christian’s inability to decide where speakers ought to be placed in a large room in his own house in the south of France,” says Fichte. “He had a brainwave where he thought, well, if I put speakers everywhere, I can use the room however I like.” There is no single point where Hyriss sounds best. The clarity, the volume, the sense of acoustic space, is evenly and beautifully spread. The sweet spot is everywhere.
