Bespoke Audio

Amadeus loudspeakers can be fabricated or finished in a range of materials — to match an interior, integrate into a listed building, or stand as an independent object. The following finishes have been realised on completed projects.

• COR-TEN steel — laser-cut and welded, with a controlled rust patina halted by chemical treatment and sealed with a transparent matte varnish. Used for Maison Krug's tasting room enclosures and the Mas des Fées outdoor system.
• Mirror-polished aluminium — laser-welded sheets formed over timber cabinets and hand-buffed to a reflective finish, carried out entirely in-house. Realised for the Summit Triangle Paris installation.
• Gold leaf — applied to eight loudspeakers at the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, to match the monument's architectural polychromy.
• Phosphor bronze mesh — used for 2.5-metre columns at the Saint-James Paris, each housing five ribbon transducers.
• Corian solid surface — weatherproof and mouldable, used for the VK 18 in-ground subwoofer, the Mas des Fées in-ground subwoofers, and a monolithic outdoor horn stack for Philippe Parreno's Membrane at Fondation Beyeler.
• Stone powder coating — a micro-coating of lime, stone powder and resins matched to the host surface, used to conceal loudspeakers within the walls of the Panthéon and the Théâtre de l'Archevêché in Aix-en-Provence.

Where the brief requires it, Amadeus designs systems with no visible presence. Loudspeakers are concealed within roof structures, flush-mounted into walls, embedded in furniture, or installed below ground — the integration is part of the engineering specification, not an afterthought.

At Domaine des Étangs, 32 coaxial loudspeakers are concealed within the purlins of a timber roof structure, eight subwoofers are flush-mounted into stone walls, and two enclosures are hidden beneath the mezzanines. The result is a 44-speaker immersive system with no visible components. At Villa A11, TV sound bars are built into furniture and fitted with motorised lift mechanisms that retract the unit together with the screen when not in use.

Several commissions have required the loudspeaker itself to carry a specific cultural or decorative reference — not as ornament, but as a condition of the brief.

For Villa A11 in Al Ula, Saudi Arabia, the front façades of a family of TV sound bars are patterned after traditional mashrabiyya latticework, acoustically transparent and structurally integrated. For the Krug tasting room, the Maison's monogram is laser-perforated into the COR-TEN steel façade. At Mas des Fées, the pedestal design references the work of Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza, several of whose pieces are installed on the estate.

Some projects treat the loudspeaker as a designed object in its own right, developed in collaboration with architects or designers and built to a standard that places it alongside other significant pieces in a room.

The Philharmonia was originally commissioned for the recording studios of the Philharmonie de Paris, in collaboration with architect Jean Nouvel. Its cabinet is composed of 547 individually machined birch veneers. A passive residential version is available.

The Liaigre ribbon columns at the Saint-James Paris are 2.5 metres tall and house five ribbon transducers each — a hybrid technology combining dual paper membranes with neodymium-iron-boron magnets. They were co-developed with Christian Liaigre as part of a broader furniture commission.

Outdoor installations introduce constraints that indoor systems do not face: weatherproofing, thermal variation, UV exposure, open-air propagation, and in some cases permanent underground installation. Amadeus has completed several such projects.

The VK 18 is a folded-horn subwoofer fabricated in Corian and buried below ground, with only a flush-level opening at the surface. It delivers 98 dB sensitivity, 134 dB peak SPL, and extension to 26 Hz in open air.

The Mas des Fées system comprises five COR-TEN loudspeakers on bespoke pedestals and Corian in-ground subwoofers, forming a permanent 5.1 outdoor surround installation on a private estate in the South of France.

For Philippe Parreno's Membrane at Fondation Beyeler, Amadeus developed a bespoke outdoor system conceived as a single monolithic stack, built in Corian and fitted with custom weatherproof transducers. It combines a horn-loaded point-source section with a low-frequency enclosure housing three 15-inch drivers in a 300-litre cabinet. Installed on the museum's outdoor deck beside Parreno's 14-metre tower, the system produces infra-low frequencies alongside vocal-like sonic textures — functioning as a voice projection device for the work rather than a conventional loudspeaker.

Several Amadeus installations have been carried out within UNESCO-listed or otherwise protected heritage sites, where the physical constraints on installation are as demanding as the acoustic ones.

At the Théâtre de l'Archevêché in Aix-en-Provence — a UNESCO-listed open-air theatre — 52 loudspeakers were installed for Mozart's Idomeneo under conductor Raphaël Pichon. Several units were coated in natural stone powder matched to the historic walls, a finish developed specifically to satisfy the heritage protection conditions of the site. The system combines active acoustics and Wave Field Synthesis spatialisation, with independent reverberation processing for the soloists, chorus and orchestra.

At the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris — a 13th-century Gothic monument classified as a historic monument — 15 bespoke loudspeakers were installed for Robert Wilson's Gloria. Eight were covered in gold leaf, matched to the architectural polychromy of the chapel to vanish into the decorative programme of the vaulting. Several units are suspended from the historic roof structure by stainless steel cables of nearly twenty metres, stabilised by nylon wires threaded through the vaulting with no permanent fixings to the stonework.

At the Panthéon in Paris, 70 loudspeakers were made invisible through a micro-coating of lime, stone powder and resins matched to the stonework. The installation — a commission for the Armistice Day 2020 ceremony presided by President Macron — required the acoustic and physical treatment to be fully reversible and invisible to inspection.

For Mélissa Von Vépy's production Piano Rubato — performed at the Festival d'Avignon and other venues — Amadeus engineered a sound system built into a grand piano installed within the hull of a five-metre-high boat sculpture. The structure rotates through 360° and oscillates through 180°, activated by the performer's breath via a counterweight mechanism.

The system had to deliver high-quality sound reinforcement while being permanently mounted in an aerial rigging apparatus subject to constant rotation, mechanical stress and strict weight limits. It was required to work across a range of venue configurations — theatres, open-air spaces, industrial halls — with audiences arranged frontally or semi-circularly, and without reconfiguration between shows.

For the OWD — a 100-metre private motor yacht with interiors by Studio Liaigre — Amadeus developed a two-way loudspeaker adapted from the Philharmonia, with a compression driver on a solid-machined horn replacing the dome tweeter. This choice was driven by the acoustic conditions on board: reflective surfaces, long throw distances, and continuous structural vibration. The low-frequency section uses passive radiators in a sealed enclosure, removing the rear port and the parasitic reflections it would introduce in a moving environment.

Several recent projects have extended the system beyond conventional loudspeakers — into physical sensation, physiological measurement, or both.

Amadeus's haptic floor — developed with PRISM, a CNRS laboratory in Marseille — transmits low-frequency vibrations directly through the floor structure, producing tactile textures down to 1 Hz. It was originally developed for a private estate in Saudi Arabia as a way to increase the physical impact of music without raising airborne sound pressure levels.

For the Accor group, Amadeus led the electroacoustic development of an immersive 3D sound capsule integrating real-time EEG biofeedback. The system adapts its spatial audio output in response to the listener's neurological state, measured continuously during the session. Developed as part of HOLOPHONIX R&D, it brings spatial audio into direct contact with neuroscience and adaptive wellbeing applications.

At Pathé's La Cerise — a cinema for 18, designed by Renzo Piano, due to open on the Paris rooftop facing the Opéra Garnier in September 2026 — per-seat micro-subwoofers provide a haptic dimension alongside individual headphones carrying a binaural surround signal rendered in real time by a HOLOPHONIX processor.