If you’ve been following home theater for the past decade, you know we’re living through something special. A golden age, really – where performance, immersion, and convenience have reached levels once thought impossible. We have 4K with stunning HDR. Consumer-grade receivers that can decode 13-plus channels of lossless audio. Room correction tech that bends bass to your will. And high-bitrate content delivery from playback systems like Kaleidescape and DCI media servers, both of which cast a shadow over the age-old “streaming vs disc” debate.
The best of the best is so good, you start to wonder: what’s left to conquer?
That isn't just me wondering aloud. At a recent industry gathering, an AV luminary – unprompted – posed that exact question. “What’s next? What more is there to do?” And truthfully, it’s a fair question. The modern home theater setup has become so dialed-in, so optimized, that imagining a future beyond blacked-out rooms and rows of plush recliners requires a mental leap.
In my downtime, I've conceptualized a few ideas, but none of them truly address the core issue: how to advance the experience of home AV without merely making existing gear incrementally better.
It turns out the answer may not be in tweaking what we already know, but rather rethinking the entire playing field.
That’s where L-Acoustics and its HYRISS solution enter the picture.
A Legacy of Sonic Innovation
L-Acoustics is no stranger to big sound and flashy events. The French manufacturer and sonic solutions expert has been operating in the world of pro audio for decades, with massive installations in venues like Dodger Stadium, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Omnia nightclub at Caesars Palace. Those systems, and many others like them, are built for clarity, projection, and control.
Ever hear of a line array? You can thank L-Acoustics and its V-DOSC system for ushering that concept into our modern reality. It’s an approach that nearly every pro audio outfit uses in large concert and event situations.
More recently, L-Acoustics has begun expanding beyond the pro world, dedicating resources to residential applications. It did so by leveraging the strengths of its in-house platforms and distilling proprietary tools into technologies capable of sonically transforming home theaters, high-end media rooms, custom installations – even yachts. The initiative kicked off in 2020, so you can imagine how global circumstances complicated the rollout. But fortunately for us, the company's leadership wasn’t deterred.
My first taste of the L-Acoustics experience came in 2024 at the annual CEDIA trade show in Denver, Colorado. The company hadn’t been on my radar in the months leading up to the event, but a media contact convinced me to schedule a demo room session and a chat. I obliged, but full and honest disclosure: I wasn’t expecting to be blown away.
What I heard in that room stopped me in my tracks. The sound was raw, revealed, and refreshingly unprocessed. Bass was tight and visceral. The room sounded alive but not artificially enhanced. It was immersive, clean, and – most importantly – it felt real.
I recall thinking, 'This is the kind of system I could live with.'
I walked out of that space and spent the rest of the show telling anyone who’d listen, “You’ve gotta hear what L-Acoustics is doing.” Turns out, I wasn’t alone. People were talking.
Fast forward to early 2025, and I found myself standing in a North London neighborhood, buzzing through the front door of L-Acoustics’ UK offices. The building is rather stately, adorned with an artful red brick facade and nestled amongst what appears to be residential housing. In fact, I had to do a double-take or two before I realized I was at the correct location.
Thinking back, it’s a shame that passing traffic and pedestrians have no clue as to the kind of sonic magic that’s happening behind those weathered brick walls. If they could only step inside, I guarantee their perception of that building would change forever.
An Audio Space Unlike Any Other on Earth
HYRISS, short for “Hyperreal Immersive Sound Space,” isn’t a speaker system in the traditional sense. It’s a complete reimagining of how sound can exist in a room – a system designed to erase the boundaries between home theater, two-channel listening, ambient soundscaping, and even live performance. The name itself hints at ambition. This isn’t about pushing sound to a room. It’s about transforming the room by adapting its feel, shape, and presence through sound.
At its core, HYRISS leverages L-Acoustics’ pro-grade speakers and proprietary signal processing technologies to build three-dimensional, dynamic environments that shift on command. With touch-based controls, you can rotate a soundstage to face different parts of a room. You can bring a movie’s dialogue to a seating area, then swing music over to the bar or dining space. You can trigger ambient reverb with embedded microphones, mimicking the acoustics of a concert hall, a jazz lounge, or a quiet garden terrace.
It’s not just a home theater system. It’s not just whole-home audio. It’s something entirely different – a hybrid platform that can create, manipulate, and elevate your sonic environment in ways the traditional AV stack can’t.
A week before my visit to the UK, I’d heard some of HYRISS’s core technologies in action at ISE 2025. It was deployed in a compact demo space designed to highlight the platform’s flexibility, featuring speakers overhead, on the walls, and a control system to steer audio using the company’s “Anima” technology. It was impressive, but hinted at something larger, more capable – something you could only fully understand in a real room, at scale, which is exactly what brought me to North London.
The Walls Start to Disappear
The affable and wickedly sharp Nick Fichte, L-Acoustics Business Development Director - Home and Yacht, had gone out of his way to accommodate my travel schedule, making my UK visit to his office possible. Nick’s enthusiasm is contagious, his knowledge extensive, and every time we’ve interacted – from CEDIA 2024 to ISE 2025 – he’s promised that a visit to London would be worth it.
I met Nick in the facility’s entry area, and it was game on from there. We passed through a reception area, quickly entering the main HYRISS demo space – a room unlike any media space I’d ever set foot in.
It’s big. At roughly 90 square meters (970 sq ft), it dwarfs the size of a typical home theater, but not so large as to feel out of reach for luxury residential design. A clean, modern aesthetic dominates the space, with acoustically transparent fabrics lining the walls, stylish lighting setting the mood, and sleek design elements, such as flush-mount displays styled as movie posters and wall art. One end of the room features a seating area with a large flat-panel TV. The other end? More seating, different vibe. Coffee table, casual elegance.
As I walked in, I turned to Nick and remarked, “This room sounds lively.” I chalked it up to hardwood floors, or maybe the sheer size and layout. It had an energy. A sense of space. But no – it wasn’t the wood, it wasn’t the surfaces, nor the size.
It was HYRISS.
Unbeknownst to me, the Ambiance system was already running. Eight hidden microphones embedded around the room captured sound, processed it through L-Acoustics' L-ISA engine, and fed it back through a hidden speaker array. It created a subtle, totally convincing illusion of space, as if the walls had been thinned just enough to let the outside world bleed in. Street noise. Distant chatter. It was faint, but perceptible. Real, but completely artificial.
I was floored. I’ve heard spatial DSP effects before – Yamaha’s DSP modes come to mind – but this wasn’t a trick. This was architecture-level audio design. The room wasn’t just treated for acoustics, its entire vibe was completely reprogrammable.
From there, my time with HYRISS unfolded like a guided tour of what AV might be like in five or ten years. But let’s keep in mind, this is the now, and L-Acoustics is making it happen.
We settled into the home theater side of the room for an automated demo. Ambient processing was shut off, and the weight of a silent room let me know the system was about to flex serious muscle. The experience began with ambient rainforest sounds played from a simple stereo source, though you’d never guess it. HYRISS rendered a soundstage so vivid, it felt like we’d stepped into the rainforest’s living, breathing expanse.
Next, we were introduced to background music – “Birds" by Dominique Fils-Aimé – emanating from above, courtesy of a stereo pair of hidden ceiling speakers.
Conventional enough, right? Hardly noteworthy, you say?
With HYRISS, nothing is conventional. The system guided playback of the track to a space in front of us for deeper listening. Then, harnessing the technical power of Anima, HYRISS separated and spatialized the track’s instruments – live and on the fly. We’re talking heady, precise engineering that delivered an Atmos-like experience on demand.
HYRISS also proved extremely competent with full-on cinema playback. High SPL, low distortion, incredible spatial resolution. As a movie demo played, every speaker in the room (all L-Acoustics, of course) snapped into formation. The result? A proper, reference-level theater experience complete with tight bass, pinpoint imaging, and top-tier immersion. And yet, it didn’t feel like I was sitting in a traditional home theater; in fact, my eyes told me otherwise. This wasn’t a blacked-out AV vault – it was a space you could live in.
At this point, I was convinced. The visit was indeed something special. Then, Nick’s voice – pre-recorded as part of the demo – invited us to step into the center of the room and “face the orchestra.”
Along one wall, multiple speakers that had previously served as surround channels were now dedicated as left, center, and right channels. Wides joined the equation, as did other speakers dispersed around the room. The system queued up the Harry Potter theme performed by the LA Philharmonic… and let it rip.
The resulting wave of sound was cinematic. Broad. Emotional.
I could feel the SPL pushing into live concert territory, but it never fell apart. The low end stayed grounded, the mids remained open, and the top end had that raw, unfiltered edge only pro-caliber gear seems to deliver.
From there, Nick pulled out an iPad and showed me how the system could pivot on the fly. With a few taps, the entire sonic focus of the room shifted. Movie mode became lounge mode. Stereo music moved from the wall to the ceiling, then to another part of the room. The experience followed the intent, not the other way around. HYRISS was giving him true spatial command.
Speakers, Speakers, and More Speakers
The HYRISS system deployed in that Highgate space relies on a massive 60-speaker array that breaks down into a 16.1.12 layout. That’s 16 bed layer channels comprising fifteen Soka On-Wall speakers, with a single X8i speaker acting as the center channel for home theater duties. The “.1” is a mind-bending configuration of 32 (yes, thirty-two) SB10i subwoofers grouped in 16 pairs – one pair positioned beneath each Soka. Twelve ceiling-mounted X6i speakers round out the top layer. The system also employs eight Audix SCX10 microphones to feed the Ambiance system, capturing real-time room information that’s used to inform spatial and ambient adjustments.
You might not be blown away by these speakers visually. They’re compact and purposeful, almost utilitarian. And in most cases, they’ll likely live their lives hidden in stud bays. But feel one with your hands, and the build quality becomes instantly obvious. And when you hear them?
Oh… they sound so sweet.
The Soka On-Wall speakers are only 3.9” deep but house nine 3.5" neodymium cone drivers and three 1" compression drivers, making for a slick collinear source. They’re designed to provide consistent SPL and wide dispersion from a slim enclosure, making them perfect for architectural integration. The X8i – used as a center channel – features an 8" low-frequency (LF) driver and 1.5" high-frequency (HF) compression driver in a concentric configuration. And the X6i ceiling units bring 6.5" LF and 1" HF drivers to the height layer, maintaining phase coherence and spatial integrity from above.
Meanwhile, the bass-hungry SB10i subwoofers are a marvel of slim-line performance. Measuring just 21.3 inches tall and 12.2 inches wide, they hide effortlessly in stud bays beneath each Soka while delivering serious low-end punch. Single 10" drivers per enclosure, precisely tuned – it's bass you feel.
The Brains of the Operation
After letting HYRISS stretch its legs and wow our ears, Nick took me to a room just above the demo space. The rack room.
It’s a space that definitely needs to be isolated – the cooling fans for a pair of Disguise EX3 units produce a noticeable whir as they push air over their Nvidia video processing chips. But aside from that, the rest of the equipment runs cool and quiet… and is anything but ordinary.
There’s one StormAudio ISP Elite MK3 used solely for audio decoding. No processing, just clean AES/EBU output. That signal is handed off to two LC16D converters, which translate AES/EBU to Milan-AVB (Audio Video Bridging), ultimately feeding a single L-ISA Processor II. L-ISA is where L-Acoustics applies its proprietary spatial magic. They’re tight-lipped on what exactly happens in that box, especially when it comes to low-frequency shaping – but whatever’s going on, the result is simply phenomenal.
Also present are two P1 Milan-AVB processors handling analog mic inputs and five LS10 Milan-AVB switches. The audio flows seamlessly over an AVB backbone, with network clocking handled by dedicated timing gear.
As I mentioned, the rack includes two Disguise EX3 video playback systems, commonly used in theme parks and museums, which L-Acoustics leverages to create dynamic video content for the in-room poster displays. An assortment of media sources (Apple TV, Kaleidescape, etc.) is routed into the StormAudio unit, completing the front-end chain.
Amplification is delivered via three LA7.16i amplified controllers, each one 16 channels strong and capable of 1300W per channel. And yet, that stack of three massively powerful amps takes up less vertical space than the two multichannel amps housed in my rack at home.
That’s a benefit of pro audio roots, I guess.
Cracking the Code: What HYRISS Reveals About the Future
As I stood in that London showroom watching Nick swipe through control presets, I couldn’t help but return to my core question: What’s left to conquer? What’s the next big step?
L-Acoustics doesn’t just have an answer – they’re already operating it. A completely new, futuristic orientation.
HYRISS isn’t about making traditional home theater better by degrees. It’s about escaping the traditional model altogether and transforming one room into many – cinema, lounge, studio, stage – without moving a single piece of furniture. And it does this not with gimmicks, but with concert-grade tools: microphones that shape the room’s personality, speakers that vanish into architecture, and a processing engine that sculpts emotion with remarkable precision.
You don’t just watch a movie with HYRISS. You curate an experience. You don’t just listen to music. You place it in space – move it, share it, and soak it in.
And maybe that’s the most radical part of all. This isn’t a system that demands a sealed black room with a starfield ceiling. It thrives in open, bright, lived-in spaces. It blurs the line between lifestyle and performance. One minute you’re enjoying a reference-level Atmos presentation; the next, you’re sipping coffee while the walls quietly echo with the illusion of a bustling café or a hushed concert hall.
That kind of fluidity doesn’t exist in traditional AV thinking. But it might be exactly what the next generation of systems needs.
The golden age of home theater is here and far from over – and with HYRISS, L-Acoustics may have cracked the code for what comes next: reference-grade, transformative sound. And for me, that’s a future I didn’t know I was waiting for.
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