Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design Podcast with a super special edition. I love taking the podcast on the road, and not even just on the road, to one of my favorite cities to travel for work, Nashville. Specifically, we’re here at the L-Acoustics office, the Nashville headquarters of L-Acoustics, here with Mr. Nick Fichte. Appreciate you. Global business—I had to write it down because it has gotten longer over time.
Nick Fichte: It has got longer.
Rob Stott: Global business development lead for hospitality, home, and yacht. Did I capture everything?
Nick Fichte: You did. Yeah. Absolutely.
Rob Stott: Awesome. First of all, I appreciate you, Mary Beth, who’s off camera, the whole L-Acoustics team for what you’ve done this week in getting us here.
Nick Fichte: We appreciate you coming down. We’ve invested in this space, and to get people to come to it is great. So we’re incredibly grateful for having you come along.
Rob Stott: Thank you so much for that. I think back to the HYRISS demo that I got on the CEDIA floor and hearing that you guys were opening this space after that. I think CEDIA was that September. This opened in February of this year, ’26. To have this space, the first in North America, correct? Talk about the importance of establishing that.
We’re going to dive into the technology and all the fun stuff behind it and what goes on in here, but just the presence. Talk about the importance of that and bringing this here.
Nick Fichte: I think we’ve been operating in the residential space for over six years now with a real focus on it. We’d done residential projects before then, but it was kind of just a byproduct of what we were doing on the professional side of things. We’ve been very fortunate. We have an office in Westlake Village in Southern California as well, and that space has been great for bringing integrators to and all the rest of it.
As the business has evolved and grown, and obviously North America is a hugely important market for us, there was always a question of what we do for an East Coast presence as well. Nashville felt like the right space to land on. It’s the music capital of the world, right? We’re in a building here which is right in the hub of everything that is creative. We share a building with CAA, Amazon Music, and AEG.
It’s a great place to be, and I think it’s easy for people to travel to across the States. We wanted to have a space where we could showcase HYRISS, so this felt like the natural fit for it to have a showroom as well.
Rob Stott: You almost answered what I wanted to ask next, which is why Nashville, right? A great location. You mentioned the creative aspect. Anyone that’s traveled here, you can’t take two steps off your plane when it lands without hitting live music. So did that play a big role?
Nick Fichte: Absolutely. Where this office is, next to us, we have a concert venue called The Pinnacle, which has L-Acoustics in it, which of course is great. It is important because, as much as we’re a loudspeaker company, we’re getting very much involved with the creative side of things. We have an artist engagement team, and we want to be engaging with everyone that is involved with the creative process of music, and not just music, but sound as well. So Nashville made complete sense for that.
Rob Stott: I know we’re sitting here, too, in the HYRISS room, but this office has a lot more to it. Before we dive into this space and everything it means, because you talk about the main event, this felt like the main event, walk us through the rest of the layout here and the intent behind the office. There’s this room, the creative studio. Walk us through it all.
Nick Fichte: We start with, you walk in through the front doors, and you’re greeted by a big gold L-Acoustics logo. We’ve got our reception space there. We have a large meeting room, which also doubles up as a training room. You’ve seen today we’ve got some pupils in being trained. I was here two weeks ago for our Americas sales meeting. That space is being used for that.
We have another slightly smaller meeting room as well off the side of that, and then even smaller meeting rooms again because, of course, these days people are on Teams calls and all the rest of it, so they’re more like huddle spaces. We’ve got a kitchen area. Everything’s beautifully decorated as well. What I feel about this building is, everything from the moment you walk into the lobby, it’s like, wow, I almost feel like I’m walking into a five-star hotel, and that carries on through.
Then we have what we call the green room, even though it’s beige, where we have some really nice seating and couches where you can listen to a couple of our smaller stereo systems. Then we have the creative studio. That’s a space where artists and front-of-house engineers can come and learn about the tools that we use on the immersive side of things. Then we have the main event, really, here, which is the HYRISS showroom.
Of course, there are other smaller offices on the floor plate as well. One of our co-CEOs is based here in this office full time. Our executive director of application and our CEO of North America as well splits his time between here and Westlake.
Rob Stott: You mentioned the design intent, too. I found it intriguing, the meeting rooms, how you guys name them. Give a little background for that.
Nick Fichte: Obviously, we have meeting rooms in our offices all over the world. For those that don’t know, we have offices in Nashville and Westlake Village here in the Americas, and also Lititz in Pennsylvania. We also have two spaces in London, two spaces in Paris, plus other manufacturing plants around France and Germany, and Singapore as well.
All of the meeting rooms are named after artists that have either toured with L-Acoustics or festivals. As I was explaining to you, sometimes it can be a bit annoying when it’s like, “Pink, London,” and you’re like, “Is that meeting in London?” “No, it’s in Paris.” You kind of get used to it, and you’re like, “Yeah, I’m just in Justin Timberlake this afternoon.”
Rob Stott: To me, what’s cool about it is the level of attention to detail that you all have put into not just your products or the experience that you’re creating, but the office itself. I think it sort of permeates, it has to, I imagine, the organization and how you guys approach what you do from a product perspective, from an experience perspective, to a concert hall or what have you.
Nick Fichte: Yeah, I think it’s practice what you preach, right? Every one of our meeting rooms has L-Acoustics technology in them. When you’ve got people remotely dialed in on Teams in those two large meeting rooms, their sound is coming through L-Acoustics speakers. Because we operate in the corporate spaces, and we’re putting those products into meeting rooms, absolutely our meeting rooms should have it as well. We have speakers in the lobby, everything. It’s about that whole ecosystem and practice what you preach.
Rob Stott: Absolutely. Before we dive deeper into HYRISS, people watching likely recognize the L-Acoustics name, or at least the logo if they’ve been to concert venues and see the gold square. But the background of what you guys have been able to accomplish at the global scale, in the concert venues and things like that that we talked about, what does that history do for what you’re trying to create today?
Nick Fichte: I think you have to look back at the fundamentals of our founder, Christian. When he started this company, it was purely all about wanting to improve the connection of audience to artists through the power of sound. That ethos runs through every single person in the company.
I don’t think there is a person in L-Acoustics that doesn’t love music. In France, in the summer, in the month of June, there’s Fête de la Musique, a music festival. You will have towns across France that have a little square in the middle, and it will all be dedicated to music. So in June, we have our own festival called L-Fest.
That’s organized by a committee of employees in the main head office in France. You will see people from the guy driving the forklift truck in the warehouse on stage playing the bass with executive directors on keyboards, whatever it may be, everyone getting in. Again, that’s been in L-ISA for the last couple of years because that’s what you preach. It is honestly one of the best concerts you could ever go to. We could sell tickets to it because we’ve got some incredibly talented musicians within the company.
Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. I’m one of those people—
Rob Stott: You’ve got many other talents.
Nick Fichte: My talent in music is being able to appreciate when it sounds good.
Rob Stott: Hey, that’s good enough sometimes. Either you told us a story or I read it recently, just about your founder taking a very different approach. There are plenty of examples in our space of companies that have solved for a problem with stereo sound. I don’t want to butcher the story, so cut me off if I start telling it wrong, but mentioning how, within his own space, he thought about not the two-channel experience, but wanting to create that immersive experience, right?
Nick Fichte: Exactly. He often talks about a story of seeing Pink Floyd in France when he was younger. It was an experience he’d been looking forward to for months in the lead-up to it, and he was disappointed by the sound of that concert. It was actually in quadraphonic sound, right? They were at the forefront of trying to experiment with immersive sound.
In this industry, and you’ll know as well as anyone how many times people use the word immersive, he says the only time he feels immersed is when he’s in a swimming pool. To him, if you write down the word immersed, what does it mean? It means being in water. That’s why he uses the term hyperreal.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Nick Fichte: What he believes we should be trying to achieve is making the playback of sound, whether it’s live or recorded, as true to life as possible because the way that we see and we hear is connected. If the visuals don’t match what you’re hearing, it gets very confused, which is fatiguing, which is disorientating, which means you don’t enjoy it as much.
If we’re seeing an orchestra on a stage, and we’re seeing one soloist on that stage doing one thing, but we’re stood on the left-hand side and it’s a left-right system in dual mono, I’m going to hear it from the speakers that are in front of me, and the artist is over there. My brain has to do more computing power to understand that. If we can make that immersive, then I can hear it where it’s coming from, and so it’s a more enjoyable experience. He’s wanted to, as I said, improve that experience for listeners. This is his passion.
Rob Stott: Right. Yeah, and has been able to accomplish it in many ways. We talk about some of the things you guys have done in concert venues over time here. But getting closer to HYRISS now, I loved learning how that platform, that experience, is the complete inclusion of the L-Acoustics story. It’s all of the things you guys do coming together to create—
Nick Fichte: Speakers, subwoofers, amplified controllers, processing, everything, and then combining it with a space which is perfect. We talk about three key pillars: source, system, and space. HYRISS is the combination of the best of all three.
Rob Stott: Right. Before we dive into it, the acronym itself, talk about that for a second.
Nick Fichte: Hyperreal Immersive Sound Space.
Rob Stott: Immersive’s in the name. Getting to experience it, I talked about how we got to experience it in Denver last year during CEDIA. To me, that was impressive in and of itself, you guys being able to recreate that on a trade show floor. What was the build time on putting that thing together?
Nick Fichte: Far too long and far too stressful.
Rob Stott: Not to bring it back—
Nick Fichte: If my colleague Jeff’s watching, Pizzagate still is a problem. There’s a very long story about some pizza that got taken, and it was realized at three o’clock in the morning that the pizza had been taken away.
Rob Stott: Some hangry installers.
Nick Fichte: Exactly. We’d been talking about HYRISS so much because we had launched London in 2024, and the industry was starting to talk about it. There was a lot of buzz around it. We thought, okay, let’s go ambitious. Let’s go crazy. Let’s try and do it at CEDIA.
There’s so much stuff that’s out of your control. You’re working with a booth builder, and you’re telling them exactly what you want them to build, but they don’t know what HYRISS is. They’ve never experienced HYRISS. They’re operating out of a warehouse somewhere. We could tell them, the wall materials need to be made out of this, the insulation needs to be this, and then you turn up there, and it’s Labor Day weekend. You’ve got to go through all of the different labor workers and all the rest of it, and stuff’s not built as you’ve asked it to be done.
That was fine. We’ve had that happen before. But our biggest challenge on that one was that what we’d asked to be built wasn’t built to what we wanted it to be. One of the things, when I was giving you the demonstration earlier, I was saying the room build is so important to it. We were instantly on the back foot. We knew that the experience that we would be delivering was never going to be as—and let’s be honest, I don’t think it could ever be as good as building a real room.
Rob Stott: Right.
Nick Fichte: I remember having a conversation with my mom about it. She said, “How is it hard work doing these things?” I said, “A normal home theater build in a home takes like three or four weeks. We’re given two or three days.” So it was a challenge, but people were like, wow, okay. They noticed us, and they were like, this is different, this is unique.
That’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to dangle the carrot, saying, this is what we’re doing. We know it’s not the best experience, but give us a few months, and you’re going to be able to have a space that you can come to in Nashville where you can experience the real deal.
Rob Stott: To be quite honest, despite all the challenges you talk about having in that space, it was surreal having gone through it, and you wouldn’t know, right? You don’t know how the sausage is made, you just know it tastes delicious. So you guys did pull it off. I don’t say that because I’m sitting here in this room. It truly was impressive to see what that experience was on a show floor.
Now, you mentioned the London office. In theory, built the same way, but there are a lot of differences because that was a building you had to effectively retrofit into.
Nick Fichte: Exactly right. This was a room that was already existing. It already had a preceding system in it called Ocean. We had to rip all of that, take it back to basically bare brickwork. But the bricks were where the bricks were, and the doors were where the doors were, and the windows were where the windows were. So we had to make it work.
Rob Stott: So having a blank slate coming into this, talk about what that means to you guys to be able to create this in the vision and how you want it.
Nick Fichte: There are different things to consider with both spaces as well. The one in London is in a very residential area. We’ve got neighboring properties all around us, so we have to be considerate of noise, but we’re okay because we’re kind of isolated a bit. Versus here in Nashville, we’re on the—I don’t actually know what floor we’re on because when you get into the elevator—
Rob Stott: Fourth, I’m seeing.
Nick Fichte: Okay, so we’re on the fourth floor, but we’re on the fourth floor of a high-rise building. There are people above us, people below us, people next to us. Our CEO’s office backs onto the other side of here as well. Here, we really had to be conscious of the amount of noise going out as well as coming in.
You experienced in the demo the little trick that I like to do, where we play basically an ambient soundtrack when people come into this space because we’re wanting to talk about the importance of sound within a space. If people don’t think about acoustics when they’re designing a space, you’ll quite often get background noise coming in.
I was talking to you guys, saying, “This is the perfectly built space. It’s got great acoustics in it. You won’t hear any background noise.” I can see you all going—
Rob Stott: There’s a little thumping going on. Something’s bleeding in.
Nick Fichte: “Are you sure it’s working? Because I can hear a coffee machine going off in the background and people walking around, and it’s a bit echoey. What’s going on?” Then I went, “Well, it’s all fake,” and stopped it. Now here we are, and it’s completely silent. In fact, it’s almost eerily silent. Apologies if people can now hear my sneakers squeaking.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Nick Fichte: We work with a company called Design Technik. We have a design guideline for designing a HYRISS, and it spells out, to the millimeter, this is what we’re trying to achieve from an acoustic standpoint in there. Anyone that’s working on a HYRISS project should be involving an acoustician in it for this level of build, in the same way that they would if it was a home theater, and they were wanting it to be the best of the best.
Within the construction of this space, we were able to dictate the shape and size of all the spaces within this because it was a new building. We chose this size, and then we designed it working with Design Technik. They fabricated everything off-site in a modular way, and it just snapped together.
I had a meeting with Kevin here from Design Technik two weeks ago, and he was saying his element of building this room was like two to three days, because everything had been built off-site. When it came in, it was a case of, you’ve got to get it up into the elevator, and then you just screw it all in, and it’s done. It’s designed to be modular so that it can be repeated and scaled.
Rob Stott: Just follow the Lego book instructions, right?
Nick Fichte: Yes, like an IKEA one.
Rob Stott: Not quite, but for those that aren’t in here, I know it’s cliche to say, especially as we sit here, but we talked about it. It’s not a physical product, right? It’s the combination of a bunch of physical products that creates this environment. We can talk about it all day. I will, and we’ll eventually write about it, but you have to experience it.
You guys have created something. I know the little voice of God is really the voice of Nick during the demo, but talk about the experience that you’re trying to create in showing off what’s possible with HYRISS.
Nick Fichte: We have an automated demo script, the idea being that everything is repeatable. Any L-Acoustics employee can give a demonstration to anyone. You could come in here, without even knowing anything about it, look at the iPad, see the button which says “Start Demo,” and go, well, I think that starts the demo.
It’s built on a piece of design software called QLab, where it basically runs through scripts. Same as what we did at CEDIA two years ago, which means it’s super easy. You press that start button, and it goes, and it walks you through all the different things that it can do.
Then obviously, as we did today, I give a deeper dive into, okay, what is it that you experienced? How is that using that? What does that bring someone in a real-life example? I think that’s the important bit. There’s the museum attraction bit of it, and then there’s that, okay, but I’m a real person. How am I going to use this in my home?
It’s designed to be simplistic and to just very quickly—I mean, that automated demo, I think, is 13 minutes long or something like that. It’s just designed to give you a quick, okay, I get this.
Rob Stott: It shows off everything that’s possible with the system, right? Because from the integrator side, they think about the home theater experience, which is what they’re typically used to showing off. This is obviously, you get that, but it’s much more than that.
To me, one of the most surreal things, and it’s really the demo after the demo, is you taking a tablet and effectively moving sound around the room. Disorienting, maybe, but it’s cool to watch it happen. If you see a car go by—I like to think of a NASCAR fan, Formula One for those abroad that may care more about that circuit—the car going by in front of you and just that zip sound of the engine. You can visually see the car go by, and you’re experiencing it. This is like watching that with audio around you.
It’s trippy, but cool to watch because that is, at a baseline, we talk about spatial audio, which is a term I know we’ll dive into in a little bit. It’s making the entire room, the best word I can think of is right there in the name, immersive. We talked about it already. It’s unique.
Nick Fichte: I think it removes boundaries, and it fixes problems that people don’t really know exist. As I was saying earlier, we often see entertainment rooms, games rooms on people’s plans when they’re building their homes. How integrators try and fix the problems is usually with multiple sound systems for multiple different things in that.
If you’ve got a client that wants a space they want to watch movies in and then DJ on, or maybe do karaoke on, the integrator is probably going to say, “Well, you shouldn’t be DJing through your home theater equipment because you don’t want to damage it, and it’s not designed for that.” Or, “I wouldn’t do karaoke because you’ve got your ribbon tweeter system,” or whatever it may be, “and if that microphone gets dropped, it’s going to blow your subs,” or do this or do that.
The whole point of HYRISS is you can do it all. All of those restrictions are removed. You don’t have to face in any one orientation. You can be in any orientation of the space. It’s lighting control for sound. It’s the ability to just completely, simplistically change things at the touch of a button, change a space completely. There’s nothing else out there that can do that.
Every time I get to play with it, it’s thinking of all the different applications. Obviously, we’re working on R&D for things, and we have Anima, which is the technology where you can spatialize existing stereo content and also move it around the space. But for sports, because it’s based on a machine-learning AI algorithm where it’s detecting different instruments, sounds, and vocals, well, okay, cool, for sports, let’s get it to understand what crowd noise is.
Let’s get it to understand what a race car sounds like so that we can then position it. When we’re watching that normal broadcast sport, which is just in stereo, it’s way more than a traditional upmix that an AV receiver can do. It’s an intelligent spatialization.
Rob Stott: To your point there, I think one of the demos we saw was some soccer highlights, football, depending on where you’re watching this. We were looking at the screen in front of us and having the announcers there. I imagine you talk about the machine learning understanding that’s the commentary, the vocals that are coming, and then literally placing the crowd noise around us. So it felt like we were in the stadium and just had a special crew there with us announcing the game.
Nick Fichte: Yeah, exactly. When I did that demo, we just used YouTube, right? The most basic, lowest-quality audio stream available, and yet it suddenly improves that experience. You can imagine you’ve got all your buddies around for games night. They’re all going to be talking about how cool that was.
When we added the reverb in as well, now all of a sudden it sounds like we’re in a sports bar because it’s got that life and energy to it. When everyone cheers and when your favorite team scores or whatever, it’s going to be like—
Rob Stott: Crazy. You mentioned it, too. I think about the other side of our audience with the designers and architects, and you brought up the term lighting. They’re used to designing with light. The space, too, lighting is an important part of it, especially with the presentation. But designing with sound is not something we’ve heard much of.
That is such an important element of this, and it gets into understanding things that designers may not want to dive too much into, in terms of sound waves and sound cones and things like that. But it’s a hugely important element of what you guys are doing here with HYRISS.
Nick Fichte: It is. One of the reasons HYRISS was designed in the way that it was is because it should actually be really simple for an architect or an interior designer to be able to design themselves. Obviously, work with an integrator, but each speaker is at equal distance around the room. If you place that speaker at an equal distance around the room with the recommended spacing, then they can do it themselves because that’s how it’s been designed.
It’s designed in a way that it’s the electronics and the software which then dictate how it’s experienced afterwards. I think when the R&D team were working on this originally, they were thinking about that lighting principle. If you have can lighting in the ceiling across a whole space, you’re not going to use all of it on all the time, unless maybe that’s your cleaning scene or something like that. But you have them there because then you can recall different scenes.
Same thing with this, right? Speakers all around you, you may not use all of them all the time, but at any point, depending on your application, you can use them. It’s designed to be that simplistic so that an architect, when they’re designing the plans, or the interior designer, can go, well, I know that if this is going to be a space where they want to have a Hyperreal Immersive Sound Space, I know that there needs to be a speaker every one and a half to two and a half meters.
Rob Stott: Whether you’re talking to integrators or brands in this space, getting a designer—architects, not to separate the two, but I feel like architects with their planning and everything, maybe a little bit, and maybe I’m completely wrong, I’d love to get your feedback on this, but I feel like they understand the importance of planning these things out a little bit earlier on.
Nick Fichte: Architects do, but this is a paradigm shift. They don’t know that this stuff exists necessarily. We have an architecture engagement lead who’s going out and trying to change that, and it’s part of my remit as well.
I say with a HYRISS, the architectural design can be done, but the ideal sweet spot for us to be in is once the architectural design has been done and before the interior design has been done. Because if we can place the loudspeakers first, then the interior design can work around it.
Rob Stott: What I want to get to, too, is the conversations that you’re having. We talked about, for us, that aha moment was the sound going off, the first thing we experience when we come into the room. In talking with designers and architects, technology, for worse in our channel, isn’t top of mind. How are you finding those conversations to be with them, or what is that thing that makes them go, aha?
Nick Fichte: I think they’re always surprised by learning what’s possible. We did a pop-up this summer just gone in London at a design center where they build what’s called the world’s poshest bungalow for a month-long period. It’s called WOW!house. Basically, there are lots of different rooms throughout this building that are all hosted by different sponsors, and then they are given an interior designer.
We were asked by the integrator who sponsored one of the rooms if they could bring HYRISS to it. We invited the interior designer up to the showroom in London and gave them the demonstration. They got super excited by it because they were like, “This sound is another fabric in our repertoire.”
Russell, the interior designer from that project, runs a studio called Russell Sage Studio. He had this concept, where he does a lot of hospitality spaces that he designs for, and he said, “Everyone has their phones in their pocket, and their phones are full of memories, but they never leave the phone. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, when you’re in a space, you could relive your happiest moments?”
The whole thing hinged around his dog, Hugo. He designed this massive couch, which was a human dog bed. It looked like a dog bed, but it was for humans. Then we had a visual artist and a sound artist create content, which was him walking through the fields near his house with his dog, Hugo. It was designed to be able to take him through it. He was like, “I couldn’t have done this without the sound. To create this experience would have been impossible without the sound.”
I think that’s the aha moment, when they realize. Angela, who works on his team, was responsible for the technical design. We were given a white wooden box to build this in, like a trade show kind of build. We just did the loudspeaker layout, sent it to the Russell Sage team, and Angela, the designer, went, “Well, that’s a lot of speakers. Do we need to have all of them?” As is always the response, right?
But they were little 4-inch cubes, with our 6-inch subs. She then really leaned into it and was like, “Actually, we can create these boxes and use the same fabrics, and fabrics are good for acoustics. We know we need to have good acoustics.” They came up with this concept of drapes around the space, different heights, then worked with the lighting designer to highlight the artwork and stuff like that. Everything just became this complete—
Rob Stott: Comes together. Right.
Nick Fichte: Twenty-four thousand people apparently went through that bungalow, WOW!house, during the month of June. Every single person that walked into the space, they were like, “Well, sound is coming from everywhere. This is incredible.” Predominantly interior designers, and everyone’s realizing, okay, this isn’t such a challenge. This is actually quite easy, and the experience that I can deliver will elevate me as a designer.
Thinking about it, you can be in two ways. You can either be ignorant to what’s going on, or you can be proactive and learn about what’s going on and realize that you’re probably going to be adding value to your services, to your client, if you’re coming to them and saying, “Are you aware of this?” It’s another string in your bow.
They don’t need to be the ones that are responsible for the technical design. That’s why we have integrators. But just having them be a part of it and showcasing it to their clients is super.
Rob Stott: Right. I think it shows, too, that they get it. Especially with the demo, it’s difficult because sometimes it can come across like you’re trying to show something that’s gimmicky. This is not gimmicky in the least. You’ve got the demo, the 13 minutes. We go from incredibly dry rooms that make it suitable for a podcast to these open spaces that feel like a cathedral.
It shows the versatility of the space, but also the ability for the person designing it, the person living in it, who’s going to be using it, the event coordinator if it’s a commercial space, just what’s possible for you to create the environment you’re looking to create and how easy it is to adapt.
Nick Fichte: You mentioned commercial spaces. I always say hotel ballrooms, right, where AV is always a challenge because it’s being used for different things. It’s a wedding one day, a birthday the next, and every single one’s got a different AV setup. If that ballroom had HYRISS installed and it could do every single one, rather than having to have people lug things around, they literally just press a button on a touchscreen.
Rob Stott: I want to ask, too, the idea of spatial audio. We can get into the technicalities of how different the terms really mean, but effectively, that is a term people are familiar with now more, I think. How important has the rise of awareness around spatial audio been for what you guys are doing here?
Nick Fichte: Massively. I think we have to thank companies like Apple, who, on AirPods, made Dolby Atmos possible for the consumer. All of a sudden, now people are aware of what spatial music is, whether that’s through services like Tidal or whether it’s through Apple Music. Even just regular broadcast TV is getting Atmos on it now. I see Formula One, for example, with the Apple TV partnership here in the U.S., they’re going to be adding Atmos to that. I think people are aware of it far, far more.
Back in the day, we have to think where technology’s come from. I remember when I was a kid, you start with your CRT TV, your big TV in your bedroom. You’re like, “Yeah, this is it. I’ve made my movie theater.” Then you add a pair of speakers to it, you’re like, “Ooh, now it’s got better.” I was like, “Now I want to add some surrounds at the back.” But everyone else was always like, “All these speakers.” It’s like, “Well, listen how immersive it is.”
I remember my bedroom when I was at college. I had a Bose 5.1 system, which I’d inherited from someone. I’d have friends come, and they’re like, “What? This is crazy. Why have you got this in your bedroom?” I’m like, “Because—”
Rob Stott: Just wait.
Nick Fichte: Look at where I am now, still obsessed with it. I think it is amazing. One thing that annoys me about it, though, is, again, it goes back to that usage of the word immersive, and spatial is no different to immersive in that sense. What upsets me about it is that there is no level of quality or standard within this technology.
I can experience Dolby Atmos on my AirPods. When I’m watching a TV show on Netflix on the plane yesterday, that’s telling me I am listening to immersive audio in Dolby Atmos sound.
Rob Stott: Right.
Nick Fichte: My question to you, Rob, is, what is a better experience, watching that TV show through my AirPods or the same TV show here in this room?
Rob Stott: Let me think, the ambient noise that comes in from a plane when you’re flying. So I think this did it a little better.
Nick Fichte: Yeah, and not just that, but the object placement and the low-end frequencies and everything. It’s the same Dolby Atmos and the same spatial or the same immersive experience on paper. So is a Sonos soundbar. I have a Sonos soundbar at home that can do Dolby Atmos. It can’t do it as well as this room can do it. So I think it’s great for awareness.
But what’s not good for awareness, and what we need to get better at as an industry, is making sure that people are aware that there is a whole level above that AirPod and above that soundbar experience.
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great gateway for them to understand the term. It’s kind of funny we’re sitting here. I hate to date the podcast, but we’re talking about it on the day that Apple also got into the smart home. They’re making a play into this space that, think about it what you will, but it’s that double-edged sword. Yes, they’re coming into it, but they’re bringing with them a whole class of consumer that now is going to be interested in it more.
Nick Fichte: It’s going to be interesting. Very briefly this morning, I saw it announced and went, “What’s that?” You were probably frantically trying to get something out about it at the same time I was trying to read about it. I’m intrigued.
Rob Stott: Right. Same concept.
Nick Fichte: I want to know, will it be able to run—I have a Crestron Home system in my house, so I have touchscreens on my walls. I have an Alexa Dot on the side of my kitchen, which is connected into the Sonos, which goes to the ceiling speakers and all the rest of it. I’m thinking, huh, but I want that Apple device because that’s going to be super cool for doing the calendar. My wife and I have a shared Apple calendar, and I’m thinking that’s going to be perfect because it’s there in the kitchen, and I haven’t got one of those Skylight things.
I think that will fix that problem, but then I’m like, is it going to run? I noticed it said on it that it will run certain iOS apps. Will it run the Crestron Home app on it? Will it run Spotify on it? Will it run so-and-so on it? Or are they going to be like, no, you have to have Apple Music? It’s going to be really interesting to see where it goes.
This isn’t a new thing. I was watching a YouTube video this morning.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Nick Fichte: I was up at 5 a.m. This guy, who’s bought a new home and is renovating it, was running through the building costs of his house that he’d spent so far. He’s put in a Ubiquiti network himself with Ubiquiti Wi-Fi, Ubiquiti cameras, a Ubiquiti doorbell. He’s put in Shelly smart switches behind all of his keypads. I think he’s put some Somfy shades in or something like that. He’s using the IKEA smart home stuff as well, and he’s building it all into Home Assistant.
He calls it out, and he says, “I’ve spent £8,000 on this kit, which to me is a lot of money. But if I was to go to a professional smart home company to get this done, it would have been hundreds of thousands.” Now, he’s the kind of guy that has got the time to sit there and fiddle with it, right? I always say that our industry’s client base is the DIFM market: do it for me. When I need my tires changing on my car, I don’t do it myself. I take it to an expert to do it.
There is still absolutely a market for the high end and for the people that have the time for it. I think this smart home stuff is great for building awareness and all the rest of it. I think it’s dangerous, again, because of the same terminology problem as immersive and spatial. What’s the difference between someone who’s got the new Apple HomePod versus someone who’s got a full Crestron Home or Savant or Control4 system? You can do a lot with it, and you will obviously be able to do more and more as it gets to it, but you’re then reliant on yourself when it goes wrong.
Rob Stott: Right. Again, getting them in the door, the gateway drug, if you will, of understanding what it is to then realize there are way better options out there.
Nick Fichte: Additionally, companies like us that operate in this channel, we don’t have the same budgets as Apple, Amazon, and so on and so forth. That’s where we are because they all have other products which they sell millions and millions of.
Rob Stott: We bring up the name, I have to ask, too. I don’t want to come completely out of left field here, but we’re talking about spatial audio that they helped bring to the masses. I certainly think you guys are taking that to a different level that, when people experience it, they’ll understand.
Your names got combined here not too long ago. We covered Apple Music Hall that opened up. They’re a company that doesn’t ever really talk much about their product or the environments they create. We came across the L-Acoustics name being involved with Apple Music Hall. That’s a big nod, I think, to you guys and the trust that a company like Apple has to bring your product in. I think I saw 48 L-Acoustics speakers that are in there that help create the spatial audio experience within, I imagine, the venue itself, right?
Nick Fichte: It’s at Battersea Power Station in London, which is where Apple’s headquarters are. They have a venue in there which was originally going to be a private venue, but they’ve now opened it up to the public. It certainly looks to have a spatial system.
Rob Stott: Tip to GQ for that.
Nick Fichte: It’s been great. The King was there last week having a tour. Great to see him experiencing L2, which is one of our speaker systems in there. Elton John opened it up, looked like a great show. I think it’s a 600-capacity venue or something like that, so pretty small and intimate.
It’s great. A lot of people, when it got announced, were saying, “Bring back the Apple Festival,” or whatever it was called, which was done around the world. Apple Music’s a great thing, and they’re investing heavily into musicians and their own creative spaces and stuff like that.
They invented the iPod, right? I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if a phone could have your music on it? What they’re doing as a tech company—
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Nick Fichte: Like yourself, we’ve got the Apple Watches on, we’ve got iPhones, we’re running Macs, we’re doing everything. When you’re in that ecosystem, they’ve got it nailed, and it’s great that they appreciate the sound of L-Acoustics.
Rob Stott: Awesome to see. You talk about ecosystem, too. One of the things I loved in experiencing this, and I know it was asked while we were here, was you guys keeping this an L-Acoustics ecosystem. From the room itself, we can get into that—we won’t because, time-wise, we want to be respectful of those watching—but you’ve got the specs for developing this room for people that want to recreate and have it be an L-Acoustics experience in their showroom or wherever.
But the equipment itself, wanting to keep that secure and knowing that you guys have a reputation to uphold, a sound profile to uphold, an overall experience to uphold, and keeping that true to what you are. It’s reassuring to me to hear that you don’t want it being open.
Nick Fichte: We have to. This is the best of the best of what we can achieve, and for that, we have to be involved at every step of the way. I mean this seriously to any integrators that may be watching or listening: when we’re asking to be introduced to the architect, interior designer, and the end client, it’s not because we’re wanting to build a relationship with your client to try and take them away from you or anything like that.
It’s that we want to be an extension of your sales force, and we want to help you sell this as much as possible because you’ve never sold a HYRISS before, whereas we have the expertise, and we’ve worked in these projects, and we know the way that it goes. We want to make sure that when we come and calibrate, as we will do with every HYRISS system that’s sold, it has that gold seal of approval on it. That we can hand it over confidently to that end user, knowing they have got the best of the best experience.
That really comes through trust and partnership. We believe that our dealer network, we’re working with the best of the best. We want to empower them to enable them to bring this solution to their clients. These spaces cost a lot of money.
We implore people to bring their clients to these spaces, and their architect connections, their interior design connections. Again, like I was saying with the interior designer thing, if you show your client this thing, and they think it’s cool, then you’re the person that’s done that. There’s nothing better than when you introduce something to a friend or a family member that they haven’t got, which all of a sudden changes their lives. You can be that person, whether you’re the integrator, the interior designer, or the architect.
Rob Stott: You’re the hero.
Nick Fichte: You can be that person showing someone something which is that penny-drop moment when they go, “This is what I want. This is what I’ve been looking for.” It should really be a true partnership between all parties.
I believe the most successful projects which we’ve worked on with HYRISS, in real-life projects, not just our showroom spaces, are where we are involved and in conversation with all the key stakeholders of that project.
Rob Stott: That’s a message, whether you’re talking HYRISS or just in general, I think anyone can understand.
Nick Fichte: Absolutely.
Rob Stott: It’s been incredible to watch this evolve, even just in about two years since the technology was introduced.
Nick Fichte: Yeah, it was on our 40th anniversary, the 13th of September, 2024.
Rob Stott: It’s incredible to watch how it’s evolved, watch this experience center come to life. You guys just continue to crush, man. This was a lot of fun. Thank you again for having us out here.
Nick Fichte: I really appreciate it. Yeah.
Rob Stott: Look forward to continuing to follow as this thing gets out into more homes and more spaces and experiencing it out in the real world.
Nick Fichte: Yeah, absolutely. We’re desperate to share the projects where we can, but understandably, a lot of clients are very private individuals and don’t want their home showcased, which is a shame because I promise you these projects do exist, but we can’t share them, unfortunately.
Rob Stott: All good.
Nick Fichte: We know they’re using them as well because we get to check the logs of the systems when we do health checks.
Rob Stott: Too cool. Well, Nick, thank you again, and look forward to catching up down the line, man.
Nick Fichte: Absolutely. You know where we are now.
