The Montreux Jazz Festival archives covers almost a half-century of live jazz, rock and pop music, gathering international first-class musicians within a single catalogue. In the frame of the digitization and valorisation of the whole archives by EPFL research groups, the question arose on how to foster the best listening experience in dedicated listening rooms, with the help of the most up to date acoustic techniques developed at the Laboratory of Electromagnetics and Acoustics. This question yielded to the construction of two breakthrough acoustic prototypes, the SoundRelief and the SoundDots, that should lead to new concepts of multipurpose listening spaces. In parallel, the advanced acoustic signal processing techniques developed at the laboratory were applied to the automatic recognition of sound events in the whole recording flux, that will help the digitization process, through features such as applause/speech/music detection, metadata identification or time-code assignment.