ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Nick Fichte, Global Business Director, L-Acoustics Creations, examines the enduring power and love of music only systems.

Since the advent of MP3, the general trend in audio has been for quantity and convenience over quality, and for many people, music is sometimes just a background to daily life. Yet every day, we meet people seeking to reconnect with the emotional impact of music, both at home and in retail or luxury hospitality spaces. This allows integrators to deliver premium audio systems for a truly immersive music experience, not just to support video or for multizone ‘background music’ convenience.

Cinema may have taken much of the attention and market share of integrators’ time over the last decade, but that is partially a function of the complexity of a multichannel AV system installation against a simple twochannel DIY set-up. The evolution of audio and video technologies has also played its part in the current trend for video quality and audio convenience. While audio quality has improved over the last few decades, visual content and image quality have taken huge leaps in performance over the same period. Video production technology from the 1980s would be unrecognisable today.

Long before this current video-centric trend, L-Acoustics was founded with the aim of elevating the listening experience of music at festivals, venues and clubs. Nearly 30 years on, we are at the forefront of reshaping the future of immersive sound to deliver something much more emotionally impactful in recorded music playback.

We launched L-ISA (Immersive Sound Art) in 2016, enabling engineers to mix objectbased spatial audio to a new professional standard and opening new horizons for what we call Immersive Hyperreal Sound. L-ISA technology is now widely used in live events but also has numerous applications in high end residential, from spatial audio recordings, audio-visual content, gaming, multisensory art, commercial venues and even for wellbeing and sound therapy. This potential is the foundation of what we call immersive sound spaces.

Lyngdorf FR-1

Designed for wall mounting, the FR-1 is extremely compact and solid, emphasizing our focus on dynamic music reproduction without sacrificing natural timbre. The depth of the cabinet is reduced to a minimum to ensure discreet placement and to keep the drivers as close to the wall as possible for optimal coupling to the room.

Is it time to lavish as much attention on music only as we have on home cinema?

Today, with the growing importance of Dolby Atmos for music and High Res Audio streaming, L-Acoustics is at the heart of this new immersive content revolution, allowing listeners to hear and feel music in new and exciting ways. Experiencing this technology is the only way to really understand what is possible from recorded music, and we regularly host integrators and our customers for discovery sessions as well as occasional special events open to the public.

About once a month in our 18.1.12 resolution sound spaces in London and Los Angeles, we partner with contemporary artists for immersive listening sessions, sometimes in total darkness in partnership with an organisation called Pitchblack Playback. Whenever possible, we collaborate directly with artists and labels to access the high-res master source and optimise it for the room. People are blown away. They come back. They tell their friends.

Once you’ve heard the potential, it’s no wonder the industry is beginning to embrace the new technologies that elevate music to something much more engaging and compelling. L-Acoustics L-ISA, Dolby Atmos, 360 Reality Audio, Apple Spatial Music and other formats are emerging that offer a rich source of new content. Headphones are the usual means to access such content, but connoisseurs are also seeking out high-performance systems to get the most from these formats and listen out loud, adding the physicality and sensory aspect similar to a concert or club.

The level of investment is significant but not unlike many of the elaborate home cinema projects happening in the luxury integration world. Such set-ups begin at 9.1.4 to achieve a true sense of envelopment and realism, but the design really depends upon the size and shape of the space. This is something we model with proprietary software in the same way our professional audio division maps out a sound system for a live music venue.

SPL (Sound Pressure Level) is also a significant factor in our engagement and enjoyment of live music, generating a physical connection with the sound, especially at lower frequencies. Creating a system with enough power and dynamic range to comfortably achieve these SPLs with a recorded source is fundamental to the overall impact of the finished project. It’s often a matter of customer education which is why being able to experience such a system in a demo environment is key to the overall conversation and understanding what can be achieved.

At the very top end of the market, our flagship Island and Ocean sound spaces and bespoke spatial audio ‘Bubble’ recordings in 18.1 were initially conceived as a means to reproduce reality by mapping sound to the abilities of human hearing. It is a means to preserve a musical recording true to life (or bigger than life) in its frequency, dynamics and spatial reality. Having a dedicated listening space at this level is a luxury residential investment, but one that can easily be multi purpose for music, home cinema and parties. This is where clever integration and sound design come into play, ideally in close collaboration with the interior design team.

There is absolutely no question in our mind that there is a place for listening to music out loud again, and the residential integration sector is in a prime position to capitalise on the growing trend for truly immersive audio.