Largest single-room speaker installation

The largest sound system to be installed in a single interior space comprises 465 individual speakers, and was installed in the Royal Albert Hall in London, UK, over the course of 2017 and 2018. The system was declared ready for use on 2 April 2019.

The Royal Albert Hall was designed by Henry Young Darracott Scott and Francis Fowke, both officers in the Corps of Royal Engineers, and built between 1867 and 1871. It is part of a large complex of museums and cultural institutions – nicknamed "Albertopolis" – located around Exhibition Road in South Kensington. These cultural venues were built on land purchased for the 1851 Great Exhibition, with the early stages of the project being championed by Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's husband).

As it was originally constructed, the Royal Albert Hall was a marvel of Victorian engineering. It could hold more than 5,000 people in several tiers of seating, and was topped with a grand colonnade and a massive glass-and-iron dome. Unfortunately, while impressive, this design was made with little consideration for acoustics, and the resulting space soon became infamous for its booming, disorienting echo.

The first attempt to fix the hall's acoustics was made in the early 1900s, with the installation of a heavy canvas awning over the auditorium. In 1948, this was replaced by an aluminium ceiling across the base of the glass dome roof. And in 1969, a set of circular fibreglass baffles were hung from the aluminium ceiling, finally diminishing the hall's notorious echo. The sound quality in the higher tiers of seating was still not ideal, so the "mushrooms" (as the baffles were nicknamed) were often augmented by several generations of speaker systems, of which the current installation is the most extensive and elaborate.

The new speaker set-up was installed after a comprehensive acoustic survey of the space by architectural acoustics specialists Sandy Brown (UK). Once they had a detailed 3D model of how reverberations propagate within the room, they commissioned D&B Audiotechnik (DEU) and the SFL Group (UK) to build and install the new system.

In addition to the 465 speakers, the Royal Albert Hall's new sound system includes 211 microphones and 15.291 km (6 miles) of cabling.