L-Acoustic’s SoundVision Connect could be a collaboration powerhouse for concert design

L-Acoustics has released a major update to its audio system design software, SoundVision and SoundVision Connect. Plus, all versions are completely free for the next year.

If you’ve been to any concert, anywhere in the world over the last 40 years, there’s a strong chance you’ve heard L-Acoustics ‘work. Over half of the world’s largest music festivals rely on their sound systems, and many of the most boundary-pushing venues—including the new Apple Music Hall in London—use the company’s technology.

However, L-Acoustics work in the digital realm has also been notable. Released in 2004, SoundVision has become a foundational tool for audio engineers working on large-scale concert setups.

“Before the release of SoundVision,” says Scott Sugden, director of product management and innovation at L-Acoustics, “The design process mostly required accumulated knowledge gathered over repeatedly working with similar systems in various venues over the course of years. There was a lot of educated guesswork, and sometimes that produced an acceptable result; sometimes it was less acceptable.”

SoundVision aims to remove that uncertainty by letting engineers model every aspect of a venue, design their audio system, map the SPL across the entire space, and much more.

For Sudgen, who spent years designing the setup at Coachella, it allowed him to confidently predict what everything would sound like before ever setting foot in the Colorado Desert.

“[At Coachella] every year, for over a decade, the number of seconds I was allowed to hear the sound system before the first band was generally between zero and 60,” Sugden says. “The world’s largest music festival had almost no time for system validation or calibration before the first sound check of the headliner artist. Meaning everything had to be done in pre-production. SoundVision allowed me to do that.”

At the company’s Media Software Summit this month, L-Acoustics announced SoundVision version 2026.4, with significant performance improvements for users of Apple’s silicon-based Macs, and additional support for projects using L-Acoustics flagship L1 line array systems.

More eye-catching, though, are the updates to SoundVision Connect. A cloud-based collaboration platform, designers can share proposed concert systems with clients and colleagues. First launched in 2025, features added in the new update include the ability to add comments on a model, see a full inventory of every component, create and share different versions of a design for A-B testing, and store all changes and files online.

“The process of collaboration was typically very fragmented before,” says L-Acoustics product marketing manager for software, David Reid. “There are long email threads with attachments, PDFs, and screenshots, which makes it very difficult to keep track of the current version of a design. This is what we tried to tackle with SoundVision Connect.”

Alongside this update, the company is also introducing SoundVision Connect Plus – a new tier that offers vastly more projections, versions, and collaborators. While the regular version can accommodate three cloud-based projects, SoundVision Connect Plus expands that up to 1,000. You can also have up to 8 different versions of each project and ten project owners who can all work on a design simultaneously.

Crucially, the regular version of SoundVision Connect is free and will remain so, while the new Plus tier is free for the next 12 months. There are no details yet regarding its eventual pricing.

“What we’re trying to do is make SoundVision Connect more scalable to the needs of various businesses,” points out Reid. “If you’re an individual sole trader, maybe SoundVision Connect is a good entry point for you. You can store up to three projects, three versions per project, and there can be three project owners. But with SoundVision Connect, all of that expands.”

SoundVision and SoundVision Connect are available for free; SoundVision Connect Plus is free for a limited time.

Clovis McEvoy is a writer, researcher, and composer. His work has appeared in MusicTech, MusicRadar, Future Music, and the UN’s WIPO Magazine. He is currently an Affiliate Researcher at the University of Greenwich, investigating immersive music and media. He is an award-winning sound artist and founding member of the multidisciplinary group Rent Collective.