Polygon to launch London’s first dedicated  360° spatial audio listening room

A new spatial audio listening room opens in Soho next month, built around a 17.1.10 L-Acoustics rig and a programme that treats albums as events. It’s also a useful moment to ask what 360 audio is actually for.

Somewhere in the second half of the last decade, the music industry decided that stereo was a problem to be solved. The Apple Music push into Spatial Audio in 2021, Dolby’s Atmos for Music rollout, Sony’s 360 Reality Audio, Tidal’s adoption of immersive formats, all of it arrived with the kind of marketing language that tends to make working producers reach for their drinks. The problem, for anyone who has actually tried to listen to a spatial mix through a pair of AirPods on the train, is that most of what passes for immersive audio in the consumer space is a compromise. Binaural rendering through two-driver earbuds is a clever approximation of something that actually requires a room, speakers arranged in three dimensions, and a mix built for that arrangement rather than folded down from it.

Polygon Portal, opening on Dean Street in Soho on 7 May, is a response to exactly that problem. It is a permanent, purpose-built 360 audio listening room, running a 17.1.10 L-Acoustics immersion system. For those not fluent in speaker arithmetic, that translates to seventeen speakers around the audience (each with its own subwoofer), ten overhead supported by six subs, and four additional subs at the front. Thirty-seven discrete channels, in a space sized for intimate audiences rather than stadium crowds. This is what 360 audio looks like when it isn’t being compressed into something that will fit inside a pair of headphones.

The venue is the work of Polygon Productions, who have spent several years building spatial audio environments for artists and labels and now want a permanent home for the format. Adam Nicholas, the company’s founder, frames it as a reaction to the current listening environment. “Polygon Portal was created for people who truly love music,” he said. “Spatial audio is transforming how music can be experienced, but too often it’s treated as a technical feature rather than a creative opportunity.” Whether you agree with his broader diagnosis (that focused listening culture has collapsed) will depend on how much faith you place in the argument. The counter, that it has simply migrated to headphones, hi-fi forums, and the resurgent vinyl market, is equally defensible. What is harder to dispute is that the communal album listening experience, the thing that used to happen around a pair of speakers with other people in the room, is not a format that gets much commercial support anymore.

Polygon Portal is building its programme around exactly that absence. Evening events will include spatial audio premieres of work by Jeff Buckley, Sigur Rós, Yann Tiersen, Fink, and Beth Orton, alongside label partnerships with Sony, Ninja Tune, Mute, Partisan, Edition, Exit, and Ghostly International. There will be album launches with artist Q&As, and a curated series called the Polygon Portal Essay Series, pairing themed playlists with written essays about the context behind the music. Access is via a free Polygon Insider membership, and capacity is deliberately capped.

The artist and label list is worth sitting with. Ninja Tune, Mute, and Ghostly International are not labels that pick up formats for the sake of it. The spatial mix question for electronic music is genuinely interesting, partly because so much electronic production is already built around spatial manipulation in stereo (panning, automation, reverb placement, the suggestion of depth through filtering and EQ) and partly because those techniques translate into a 360 field in ways that are not always predictable. An Aphex Twin track built on careful stereo imaging does not necessarily become a better track when its elements are distributed across seventeen speakers. It becomes a different track. Whether that difference is worth pursuing is the creative question, and the honest answer is that it varies enormously from record to record.

The wellbeing programme is the other half of the Portal’s offer, running in the mornings. Guided meditation, yoga, sound baths, breathwork, pilates, and Qi Gong sessions will be delivered in the room, working with practitioners including Earth Echo, Elemental Resonance, Senzomi, Errin Briscoe, Jnana World, House of Voga, Sana, Robert Koch, and Alex Ferreira. Sound bath practice in particular translates well to a 360 system; the use of spatial positioning to move tones around the body is closer to the format’s actual strengths than many purely musical applications. A partnership with Nordoff and Robbins, the UK music therapy charity, extends the programming into explicitly therapeutic territory, with donation options built into bookings.

The wider question the Portal raises is whether 360 audio will develop into a genuine listening format for electronic music, or whether it will remain a technical novelty attached to album-launch events. The answer probably depends less on the technology, which is already there, and more on whether artists and labels commit to producing original work in the format rather than retrofitting existing stereo mixes. For every artist who has taken the format seriously and delivered something that justifies the rig, there are a dozen Atmos remixes that sound like stereo tracks with some reverb pushed to the rear speakers. The Portal’s programming choices suggest the team knows this, which is the most encouraging thing about the venture.

Soho gets another listening room next month. Whether 360 audio gets another believer is still an open question, and that is exactly the reason it is worth going. – Sign up to be a Polygon Insider for free here: polygon-productions.live/polygon-portal 

by Damion Pell

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