When the whole world becomes a speaker

 

Meet Helge Modén, the CTO behind AiFi surround sound technology and the vision to turn every device into surround sound

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a scene Helge Modén loves. A spaceship arrives at Earth. The alien onboard wants to address everyone at once, so it does something beautifully absurd: it turns everything that can vibrate into a loudspeaker. Every surface. Every object. Everywhere. All at the same time. The entire planet becomes one system for sound.

It is funny, surreal, and also… strangely close to the future Helge has been building toward for more than a decade. Not a future where you buy one perfect speaker.

A future where sound becomes a network.

Where devices join in.
Where rooms wake up.
Where the space around you turns into a choir.

That vision has a name now: AiFi.

From a choir of speakers to AiFi – The origin story of Sound Dimension’s surround sound technology

Most audio innovation starts small. Someone tries to squeeze a little more performance from a single box. Better bass response. Cleaner highs. Less distortion. Helge started somewhere else entirely. He wanted multiple speakers to sing together, like voices in a choir. Not merely playing the same audio in sync, but forming a shared sound image that feels bigger than any one device could create on its own.

If you have ever heard a well-tuned system and felt your body respond before your brain can explain it, you know the feeling he’s chasing.

The question was: what would it take to make that feeling effortless, and everywhere?

The early days: when the dream had a physical shape

Before AiFi was software, it was hardware. The first experiments were speakers designed to work together, like siblings. You didn’t tweak one speaker endlessly. You focused on how the group behaved.The product had an early name: AiFi. Later it was rebranded into SoundDots. The names changed, but the obsession stayed consistent.

Sound was never meant to be isolated. It was meant to be shared. But early on, there was a limitation that kept nagging at them: these speakers needed to be physically close to communicate properly. They worked best when they stood together. Helge didn’t want “together” to mean “touching.” He wanted “together” to mean something deeper. So the team pushed beyond the constraint. What if the speakers could cooperate even when they were spread out across a room? That shift became the spark behind the concept that still drives Sound Dimension today.

 

The quiet breakthrough: phones were already the missing hardware

At first, they explored adding more networking capability to speakers. They even flirted with the idea of building a custom chip, something that could be embedded into “every speaker in the world.”

And that ambition is still there, as a long-term horizon. But then a simpler thought landed with full force:

Mobile phones already have everything.

They already carry:

• networking hardware
• audio hardware
• microphones
• processing power
• batteries
• always-on connectivity

A phone is basically a pocket computer optimized for real-time signal handling.

So instead of asking: How do we build new devices for surround sound?
Helge asked: How do we turn the devices people already have into a surround sound system?

That was the pivot.

AiFi stopped being “a speaker product.”

It became an audio layer that can live across phones, TVs, tablets, and existing speakers.

A surround sound technology that doesn’t need you to start over.

The engineer who thinks like a musician

Helge’s path makes sense when you learn what he did before all of this. He is a computer engineer with a telecom background. But he’s also someone who spent countless hours in music software, in home studios, obsessing over sound.

He built his own audio plugins.
He studied EQ and compression.
He even went back to university to properly learn audio engineering.

Helge is also a musician, he plays guitar and piano, so when he talks about sound, it’s never just technical.

He talks about the moment a song hits you differently because you finally hear what was always there: the nuance, the depth, the dynamics. The emotional information buried inside a recording that normal playback never reveals.

AiFi was always about unlocking that. Not for audiophile perfectionism. For human experience.

Stereo is a painting. AiFi is a room you can step into

Traditional stereo is a clever illusion. Two speakers create a left-to-right image, and your brain fills in the space. AiFi extends that illusion into something you feel as depth. It is why Helge talks about “dimensions” of sound. Not just stereo width, but the sense that the soundstage has distance and shape. That quiet details can be clear without losing power. That loud moments have impact without becoming harsh.

AiFi is built to coordinate devices so they behave like a system.

Add another device and the sound doesn’t just get louder.
It gets better.

The system can adapt its output based on:

• the number of devices
• where they are placed
• what role each one should play
• how the room affects the result

This is the difference between “multi-speaker playback” and actual surround sound intelligence.

Why people don’t misunderstand AiFi, they just haven’t experienced it

When asked if AiFi is misunderstood, Helge’s answer is simple.

When people experience it, they don’t misunderstand it.
They get the wow moment. The hard part is getting someone to that first experience.

Sound is difficult to describe in text. Everyone has heard promises. Everyone has seen labels like “immersive,” “3D,” “spatial.”

AiFi’s power is that it becomes obvious the moment the system locks in. It feels like the room changes shape.

“Together” means two things

Helge returns to the word “together” again and again, because AiFi carries two meanings at once.

Technical together – Devices synchronize and form a single sound system. A choir that self-organizes.

Social together – You’re at a gathering. Someone starts playing music or put a movie on. Everyone can join, instantly, with the device in their pocket.

You don’t need a professional setup to create a big sound experience. You bring sound with you. The group becomes the system.

AiFi turns listening into something shared again.

The hard lesson: hardware is expensive, software scales

There was also a painful truth learned along the way. The early speaker version was high-quality from the start, and that came with a cost. In hindsight, Helge says the smarter move would have been a simpler, cheaper MVP. Get it into the world fast. Let early adopters shape the next version. Instead, they went all-in early. That experience shaped the strategy that followed: focus on the core innovation and remove everything else.

The core innovation was never a beautiful speaker. It was the synchronization intelligence. The surround sound software. The AiFi layer.

So the company moved toward software-first, designed to integrate into platforms that already have users. That is why AiFi’s natural home is now in music streaming and video streaming.

Back to Hitchhiker’s Guide and AiFi surround sound technology: the endgame vision

And that brings us back to the spaceship. In Helge’s version of that scene, the future isn’t alien tech. It’s ours.

You walk into a space.
You open an app.
Your phone joins the sound system around you.
It instantly understands how to contribute.
It plays its part.

No setup rituals. No pairing nightmares. No “can you hear this delay?”

Just a network that forms itself. A choir assembling in seconds.

That is what AiFi is aiming for: surround sound that emerges from whatever devices that are already present.

Why it matters

Streaming has mastered distribution. But the listening and viewing experience is still mostly solitary and flat, even when the content is emotionally rich. AiFi changes that by making immersive sound and social listening feel natural again.

If AiFi disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn’t just lose “better audio.”

We’d lose an easier way to create:

• surround sound without new hardware
• immersive spatial audio in everyday spaces
• social listening that feels effortless
• deeper experiences of music and film through synchronized devices

AiFi is not about volume.

It’s about presence.
It’s about depth.
It’s about togetherness.

Or, as Helge would put it:

It’s about turning the world into a choir.