Iosono is the product name of an audio system presented by the Fraunhofer Institute and the Iosono GmbH in 2004. It is based on wave field synthesis

Wave field synthesis

Wave field synthesis is a spatial audio rendering technique, characterized by creation of virtual acoustic environments. It produces "artificial" wave fronts synthesized by a large number of individually driven speakers. Such wave fronts seem to originate from a virtual starting point, the virtual...

, a method to use secondary audio sources to recreate primary wave fields, that was developed at Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology , also known as TU Delft, is the largest and oldest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands...

 in the Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 in the 1980s.

Given a 3D audio "picture" of the scene, a specialised algorithm generates secondary sound waves necessary to recreate it in the particular room and then instructs a large number of speakers (300-400) to generate the "audio hologram". While traditional surround sound

Surround sound

Surround sound encompasses a range of techniques such as for enriching the sound reproduction quality of an audio source with audio channels reproduced via additional, discrete speakers. Surround sound is characterized by a listener location or sweet spot where the audio effects work best, and...

systems can only recreate the original 3D sound in a small "sweet spot", Iosono claims it can recreate the original audio in the whole room.