Last month I got to have a field trip to Nashville for a good party debuting L-Acoustics’ swank new creative hub in Nashville Yards. The town is full of construction cranes. It’s reported Sennheiser will soon open a Nashville office too.
L-Acoustics’ brand new offices sit on a high floor within the CAA Creative Office. The 11,000 square foot space seems even larger as it opens up onto an expansive commons space with massive windows overlooking the Nashville skyline (mostly cranes).
While the environment is architectural and welcoming, the real meat of the space is in the windowless rooms. The centerpiece is the first North American L-Acoustics Showroom with HYRISS (that’s the official name). It’s a replica of the HYRISS room in London that opened in 2024. It’s a round room; all the speakers are hidden within wall panels and there’s a purple/green continental luxe about it with enveloping tufted couches. But it’s not the interior design that did it for me. It was the experience of the sound. To be fair, given the demographic of my demo group, I think we hovered around 30% volume, so when you go (and you should) if you want a sound vortex I’m sure you could have one.
For me, the treat was in the details. It felt “different” almost the way an anechoic chamber feels different. With a single gesture from our demo host, the room could be almost that dry and then snap back to life. But more what I mean is just as in an anechoic chamber, you are hearing (or not hearing) an experience you never have in the real world, the HYRISS experience was so curated at every signal level that it was at once clearly processed and very moving (for me). I did tear up at a couple points just from the purity.
Much is correctly made of the incredibly audio flexibility of the space, the room could have any mood from meditation pod to Ibiza. At each of the moods we experienced, what got me was how incredibly uninterrupted the sound was. The decay was perfectly modulated, which isn’t very realistic in our constantly interrupted world, but it sure is a treat. Whether it was Lady Gaga singing or an orchestra playing or the obligatory nature sounds, or someone speaking, it was all so complete, so comfortably arched that I felt the calm and the “rightness” whether the sounds were subtle or bombastic.
The room deftly allows sound to be moved and mood shifted simply by rubbing one of the magic Murano glass orbs that controls the space (I’m not kidding there are hand-held control orbs). You simply reach for an orb from the collection and command the room. There should be robes. So while it is a residential play for the ultimate audio room (yes please), for me as a theme park designer, I could see so many options. There’s great power in being able to so emotionally control a space with sound, whether that’s telling a heartfelt story in a museum, or making people comfortable in retail.
As a practical matter, the daily work will be done in the other windowless room–the luxe Creative Studio equipped with L-ISA and L-Acoustics’ incredibly fun DJ technology (a topic for another time). Creatives will be able to experiment, mix their immersive tours, and more. They can meet and train in the rest of the office space. Overall, it’s a major commitment to the Americas for L-Acoustics and that commitment is very much embodied in the space, both in its technical investment and its hub vibe.
