The Audio Engineering Society show has been going on for many, many years, and for a long time was the only audio engineering show in the world. Because of its history, it has a number of unique features that you won't find at NAMM or the Tonmeistertagung. It's split between a scientific conference with papers downstairs and a trade show upstairs, with some connection between the two. This means that you can find actually engineers on the trade show floor, not just marketing people, and that makes it my favorite event of the year.
It's been much smaller in recent years, both upstairs and downstairs, and this year we are missing a lot of the long-term vendors that we are all used to seeing and talking to. They've done some things to try and bring in more people such as setting up workshops that are in-between the papers sessions and the trade show and try to make a connection between them, and I think that is good. This year there was a huge increase in the number of students at the show and while I think that's a good thing, there were fewer people for the students to talk with and learn from in the hallways. To my mind, that is were so much of the actual learning and technology transfer comes from: people talking in the hallways, going out to lunch and for drinks, and just generally being social and talking about their work.
But there were a lot of interesting things at the conference this year and I'd like to take these pages up to talk about them.
SPEAKERS
Genelec was showing the 8381 speakers that they initially introduced at the AES in Helsinki last year. These are large floor standing systems with DSP control that allows them to have multiple midrange drivers without interference issues by having very little crossover overlap. This allows tremendous headroom even when used at high levels as many of the studio monitoring applications demand. They are surprisingly good sounding and throw a good stereo image. They were also using them along with many other speakers for Atmos demos although I did not attend those.
Telegrapher is a new company making monitor speakers in Istanbul Turkey. They have a small line of what seem like reasonable and neutral-sounding monitors for nearfield and midfield applications. Nothing too out of the ordinary, just competent designs well-constructed without any hype. But they were so exciting that Dindae Sheena, their president of global sales, had a heart attack right there on the show floor! He was taken to the hospital and they got everything under control and he was on the show floor in two days but it was still a big shock and we hope he is doing okay now.
TOA Presentation
TOA Loudspeakers had a listening room down in a very isolated area where they were showing their ME-50 Professional Monitor Speakers. This was a small two-way design using two small midrange drivers and it sounded pretty good in spite of severe room problems. There was a box attached on a short cable which they were not able to explain sufficiently at first. The speakers gave a coherent image even in the terrible room with a cement wall behind them.
TOA is a company that in the US sells mostly into the church market and I don't think they really have any idea how to sell into the high end studio market where this product belongs. But it's very good to see them trying to introduce something like this as it actually sounded pretty good.
At the end of the show there was a brief workshop given by Yasushi Matsumoto from TOA called Loudspeaker Design Method Docusing on Impedance Characteristics in which he tried to explain some of the basic philosophy behind the design and I wish I'd seen that presentation before listening to the speakers rather than afterward. He basically talked about going back from DSP systems and biamping to a more simple high-level passive crossover, and the problems that result from the driver impedance curves being presented to the crossover not being flat. Consequently, he described using multiple very aggressive zobel networks per driver to flatten the impedance curve so that the passive crossover can work properly (and those zobel networks were what was in the external box).
He broke the spectrum of each driver up into three regions, the low frequency range, the piston motion range where the driver is working at its best, and the "split resonance area" where the driver begins to break up and develop multiple resonances. His goal was flat impedance across the low frequency range and the piston motion range without paying too much attention to the higher frequencies where other issues existed.
I think this has promise as a higher grade studio speaker (although I do worry about the higher level headroom with those relatively small (but long- throw) midrange drivers. I think this also might have a future in high end home systems if TOA can figure out how to sell it. It is really good to see this sort of thing coming out at the show from a vendor I would never have believed capable of it.
TOA was also showing the TAOC Studio Works MSTP-ME50FS stands, weighing around a hundred pounds each and made of structural steel with cast iron spiked bases. They used iron powder filling as damping material which is something I have never seen before but seems a step up from the usual lead shot. This is also something that I would like to see be taken up by a high end vendor.
Reflector Audio was showing some compound horn systems (with bass horns) made in Latvia. I am not a fan of horns for monitoring but I know there are a lot of people in the high end world who are fans of them in homes because of the narrow radiation pattern. If you're one of those fans you should check these out; they are definitely fun-looking and would do well at a high end show.
A German company called Fohhn was selling small speakers powered by Power Over Ethernet, which clearly weren't that high output since PoE is pretty limited in power transfer. But they were selling large arrays of them with beam-forming software that allowed a large array of them to produce a fair amount of total power in a controllable beam. They didn't have a good demo of the system on the show floor but I could see applications for these in a lot of situations with poor room acoustics.
And there were a very few vendors this year showing large line array systems for concert halls and outdoor festival venues, including the old standby Meyer but also a company from Italy called TT+ Audio which sold line arrays and dsp processing hardware for them but also some very interesting rigging supplies for hanging.
ACOUSTICS
Lots of acoustical products were on display! ETS-Lindgren was showing off some sealed test chambers for acoustical testing, for use as isolated drum rooms, or for voice over booths.
Malekpour Acoustics was showing off some of their design services, and these guys have built some very grade studios out there as well as mastering rooms, dubbing theaters, and listening rooms. They might be worth talking to if you're considering an extensive room retrofit.
I always enjoy Rob Maher's papers because he's doing forensic work that is so completely different than the day to day audio world that we normally talk about, and different than the theoretical work that normally comes up in these papers. In Interpreting user-generated audio from war zones he talked about how the change in attitudes toward embedded journalists combined with the availability of cellphones with video and audio recording capabilities among the civilian population have led to a huge number of homemade recordings from conflicts. And, whenever there are homemade recordings, other people start making fake ones. So how do we tell what is real and what is a forgery and how can we determine useful data from these recordings? He showed a number of recordings that had been presented to his lab and how they went about analyzing them. This is described in Convention Express Paper 265.
Low frequency content makes music more exciting and different listeners are excited by different kinds of music. This is what Nicholas Epain et al found in Physiological measurement of the arousing effect of bass amplification in music in which skin resistance was tested to determine the level of emotional response of participants in a listening test. Convention paper 10183.
HEADPHONES
Genelec was also selling their first pair of headphones, but they weren't selling them for standalone use. Their PRM monitoring system is based on the 9320A "reference controller" which allows switching, gain control, and various monitoring options. Now available for that system is a set of headphones specifically intended for it, which won't be available as separate items.
It seemed like all of the monitor companies were getting into the headphone market this year, too. Adam Audio was showing their new H200 headphones which were definitely voiced like the bright and detailed Adam monitors. I also heard a rumor that Focal, the French manufacturer of fine monitor speakers, also is getting into the headphone business although they did not have a booth at the show.
Austrian Audio was showing their HIX20 sealed-ear headphones which had good outside noise blocking and a relatively neutral sound. May well be worth it for field recording or for casual listening.
Sony also was introducing a new sealed-hear headphone, the MDR-M1. Again, good outside sound blocking without the huge top and bottom boost of the older MDR-V6 and relatives. This might be one of the more exciting products in the show because for years I have wanted something to use along side the MDR-V6 for field recording work.
IMMERSIVE RECORDINGS
Some more daring performances have musicians and singers out in the audience or in boxes or anyplace other than on stage, and this makes for real problems for stereo recordings. Often when making stereo recordings we will reconfigure the performers so as to lose that sense of envelopment or rear sound, but then something is lost. In Exploring Immersive Opera: Recording and Post-Production with Spatial Multi-Microphone System and Volumetric Microphone Array, Jiawen Mao and others from McGill University record Massenet's opera Cendrillon. The performance here involves orchestra members in the pit and up on stage, singers on stage and more singers distributed throughout the audience. They try two different microphone arrangements in the first and second rows of the hall: a 7.0.4 direct microphone array (a hybrid of two well-documented techniques) and a high order Ambisonic microphone array made from three ambisonic mikes in a row. There are discussions from an informal listening critique and some discussion of what is good and bad about each of the methods. Convention Express Paper 292.
In Exploring Immersive Recording and Reproduction Methods for Pipe Organs, Garrett Treanor and some others from NYU made a recording of a pipe organ using a Bowles Array, a square arrangement of multiple microphones intended for surround and immersive recordings. They added some additional microphones to the array and then listened to the recording (just the authors listened, not a test group) and they wrote a paper about it. This gave them a little opportunity to talk about some of the considerations involved in recording, such as the debate between making an accurate recording vs. a pleasant one, and the use of the LFE channel. There wasn't a lot here but it was good to see people recording things. Convention Express paper 270.
Influence of Recording Technique and Ensemble Size on Apparent Source Width by Renzhi Guo and Jonas Brassch from Rensselaer Polytechnic is another paper showing an experiment that doesn't appear well-controlled. The authors use a wave field synthesis system with multiple loudspeakers to reproduce an orchestra in a hall, and then mike that playback in the hall in various different ways. A listening panel then decides which of those miking methods gives the widest image. All kinds of interesting things happen, such as the mono recording being considered wider than the ORTF recording, with the Blumlein recording being a clear standout. This is an interesting project, but what works well in one hall does not necessarily work well in another, and the accuracy of the wave field synthesis also may affect the final result. The actual differences in perceived source width were really not that great which also makes me worry about accuracy. In the end all that can really be said is that early reflections change perception of source width, which is a good thing to know but we likely knew it already. In the end all this really tells us is what the best way to make recordings in that specific hall is. Convention Paper 10198.
MICROPHONES
Sanken, a high quality microphone manufacturer from Japan who deserves to be known better in this country, was showing their CUX-100K microphone. This is a rectangular-diaphragm side-address condenser microphone with an additional high frequency capsule added for the ultrasonic extension that the Japanese broadcasters specify in the 96 ksamp/second age. I couldn't tell much about the sound on the show floor but it looks promising.
Of course, the original rectangular capsule designs came initially from Pearl and although Pearl themselves weren't at the show they were represented by Fraser Jones from Independent Audio in Maine. They have recently introduced the ELM-T, a tube microphone with a very long and extended rectangular capsule almost like a ribbon microphone. I could not tell much under show conditions but their products are always worth checking out.
Branded Microphones over on the NAB side was showing some very good looking "dead cat"-style windscreens as well as smaller foam windscreens which were available with custom branding for your radio station or studio. These folks in previous years have shared a booth with Microtech Gefell but since Gefell is not here this year they had their own big booth with a lot of logo'd items on display.
Austrian Audio is a company which came out of AKG in the past few years and their former AKG engineers are making products with that lineage. Their OD302 dynamic stage microphone has an element that looks a lot like some AKG products, and some other interesting features like venting that is difficult for users with poor microphone technique to block.
AEA Microphones which is famous for making replicas and adaptations of classic RCA designs is also making a few things that aren't microphones at all and one of the things they introduced at the show was their Active TDI Duo stereo DI box. High input impedance, phantom powering, all the things you want in a convenient isolation box for studio and sound reinforcement applications.
Crysound Microphones
On the subject of replicas and adaptations, Crysound is a Chinese company making measurement microphones based on the Bruel and Kjaer designs but at a far lower price than B&K charges. They showed off a full line of capsules.
I went to a presentation by Hanzi Zhang called A comparative study of volumetric microphone techniques and methods in a classical recording context. She and her two co-authors using 7.1 playback compare the signal from a single Ambisonic microphone in a hall to a mix made from several other Ambisonic microphones in front of the orchestra. Rather than use the array of several microphones as individual Ambisonic sources, they used them to directionaly select out specific parts of the orchestra as if they were spot miking. The technique was determined to be less "immersive" than that of using a single Ambisonic microphone. Convention Express Paper 304. I will sadly add that this paper was marred by very bad sound reinforcement with a lot of P-popping and banging as well as constant ringing and occasional system feedback. Why can't sound reinforcement at an audio show be better?
Another interesting article about mike techniques was The Impact of Height Microphone Layer Position on Perceived Realism of Organ Recording Reproduction by Jessica Lee and Garrett Treanor from NYU using surround microphone arrays with and without height microphones in order to reproduce the sound of an cathedral organ. They tested a number of mike techniques but consistently found that the height microphone was of no benefit in increasing the sense of perceived realism for the organ. This is an important piece of information and needs to be considered more carefully in the light of other tests with other instruments and ensembles. Convention Paper 10189.
It is good to see a lessons-learned sort of paper where people try something and discover it doesn't work well and then write that up because it can help others in the future. In 2nd order boom microphone Jeong Kim and Thomas Miller from Knowles Electronics build a headset microphone with two cardioid microphones cancelling one another. This configuration gives considerably better rejection of outside sounds when tested in free space, but in actual use doesn't perform as well as a single cardiod. Why? It turns out it's a function of the reflections coming off the face. I went into this paper thinking it was going to be about long boom microphones as used for film production rather than headset booms, but I was incredibly glad that I did go into it because the write up and discussion was so clear and showed another example of how sometimes things in the real world are not as predictable as you'd hope. Convention Express paper 266.
TAPE
The Agfa tape formulations that were sold to BASF and later made by Mulann in France with distribution under the RMGI name are now being distributed as RTM "Recording the Masters" tape. This is excellent quality recording tape that I have reviewed before here, although they recently announced they were discontinuing the PEM468 tape without enough warning for anyone to do a last buy. I had heard rumors that this was because they had difficulty getting the oxide, but the rep there at the show told me it was merely that they weren't selling enough to make it profitable. So please talk to the RTM folks and demand 468 back again if you are a fan, and make it profitable for them to make the stuff again.
A year or so ago, Alex Kosobusky purchased the ATR Service, Inc. business that was started by Mika Spitz, and they are the premiere support organization for the Ampex ATR-100 recorder. I have nothing but great things to say about Alex and about ATR and in the past year he has been a great assistance to me. But now, in addition to support for those machines, he is offering some interesting retrofits. The HDV-3 Reproduce Amplifier is a hybrid tube/solid state module that plugs into the card cage in place of two channels of the existing playback electronics and gives you a different and maybe cleaner sound. It also has an arrangement where, if you are using only two channels, you can put two channels of the HDV-3 and two channels of conventional Ampex electronics into the card cage and switch between them as needed on the fly. This is a very cool arrangement and likely a worthy upgrade for these machines.
Another exciting tape event was the annual meeting of the Ampex User's Group. Yes, Ampex left the audio business in 1977 but the machines still keep running and there is still a support group to help people keep them running.
RECORDS
In A Survey of Methods for the Discretization of Phonograph Record Playback filters, Benjamin Thompson from the University of Rochester looked at doing the de-emphasis for records in the digital domain. He mostly looked at modern RIAA equalization but did mention that the ability to deal with a variety of older equalization curves and to adjust them after playback was one of the advantages of doing the equalization in the digital domain. He did an error analysis on some typical digital filters using Matlab and showed what happens to the impulse response given different configurations. He also pointed out that many of the problematic artifacts of digital filters can be remedied with oversampling and showed examples. This was a great paper about modern methods for playing back old records. Convention paper 10191.
David Chesky was not exhibiting but was there looking at new hardware, and I got a few minutes to talk with him in the hall. He is now working with a comparatively new venture, the Audiophile Society, which is releasing very high resolution recordings. I know that Positive Feedback had an article on this back in November 2022 with an excellent interview done by David Robinson but I'd just like to remind people of this and that there's some very fine stuff coming out.
INSTRUMENTS
When you close-mike an instrument, it sounds very different than when you hear it in a room where the sounds from all angles are being mixed together. Close-miking gives you sound from only one direction, and instruments may sound very different in different directions. This is why recording engineers have to become very familiar with the radiation pattern of typical instruments like guitars and pianos. But what to do when presented with an unfamiliar instrument? In Exploring the Directivity of the Lute, Lavta, and Oud Plucked String Instruments, a team of people from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens headed by Yannis Malifis recorded a number of middle eastern plucked instruments from different directions. One thing they showed was that the basic radiation pattern between all of these lute-like instruments was very similar, but not the same. Convention Express Paper 285
DIGITAL AUDIO
Sound Radix was showing their Auto Align Post 2 software. They already make software for automatic waveform alignment in Pro Tools, which is a handy thing for remote recording folks who often need to align spot mikes up to room mikes and so forth. They have now extended the software to make it useful for syncing audio up to video.
Over on the NAB side, Calrec was showing off some of the better digital broadcast production consoles out there, and as someone who does live to 2-track recordings these have a lot of features that I very much like. I did ask why they were on the NAB side instead of the AES side and got a bit of a lecture about how all anybody on the AES side wants to talk about is how great the vintage Calrec stuff was and nobody cares about the new stuff. Well, I am okay with the new stuff (although there is a lot to be said about their old analogue broadcast consoles too).
Mike Pappas at the Orban booth
Positive Feedback's own Mike Pappas was there at the Orban booth on the NAB side, showing the new Orban digital broadcast processors like the 5950 Digital Optimod. These give a lot of flexibility to the broadcast engineer as they can be used to make the cleanest possible sound with good loudness, or the loudest possible sound with some cleanliness, as desired by the station management. Don't blame Orban for how their products are sometimes used. We talked a bit also about the older Orban analogue gear, which have a big demand in the studio market but which employ a lot of mechanical components that would be very difficult and expensive to replicate if you wanted to reissue them. I'd love to see Orban start selling the 622 parametric equalizers again and if they did people would buy them, but the stacked concentric controls are something that just don't exist off the shelf any longer.
John LaGrou and his high-resoluton DAC
Possibly one of the most interesting things at the show is John LaGrou's Imersiv DAC. He is using milti-path converters for incredibly wide dynamic range, and this isn't really a new idea because people were doing it back in the eighties to get a full 16 bits of resolution, but Mr. LaGrou has found some ways to do it better. Of course, starting with 20-bit converters to begin with gets you far more than 20 bits of final resolution and the system is in every way limited both in linearity and noise floor by the analogue electronics driving the converters. The demos sound good, and this was demonstrated last year but it wasn't quite a final product. This year it's being demonstrated again and it's STILL not quite a final product but it's getting closer and it's good to see anyone today really trying to wring a a design out and get it perfect rather than just pushing it to market as quickly as possible. From the perspective both of high end home users and mixing and mastering users, I do think this is the most interesting thing at the show. LaGrou now has three patents on various aspects of the converter design and I am looking forward to a full presentation on how they manage drift and so forth. 170dB of dynamic range is more than 28 bits of real resolution. It's hard to believe but then I remember when 16 bits was hard to believe too.
Grimm Audio is another company that has a foot in the pro audio world and a food in the high end audio world, and they make some very fine converters and monitor speakers for audio production. They are now also making an audio streaming device called the MU2 which has an integral DAC of their own design. If you are interested in a streaming server and don't have an existing DAC that you want to use, this is definitely worth checking out. Grimm also makes a slightly older design with a digital output only called the M1.
Another converter advance was discussed by Peter Craven and Robert Stuart, in Improved Analogue-to-Digital converter for High-Quality Audio. Mr. Stuart talked about the various errors in modern sigma-delta converters caused by the multistage downsampler which is requantizing at every step of the chain and so errors can creep in. They propose a simple decimator using method of splines (and therefore needing only simple delay and addition operations) which does not require constant re-quantization and therefore results in far fewer opportunities for error (at the possible expense of latency). They have a bench prototype being tested and are currently working on getting a prototype IC version of the converter constructed. Convention Express Paper 267.
Juan Sierra from NYU gave a paper called Fourier Paradoxes which was a good presentation from a user's perspective about some of the non-intuitive aspects of using the fourier transform. People run FFTs and they look at the data but it doesn't always mean what they think and he mad some really good points about how and why. When I was starting out in audio the FFT was just coming in and older people were still using methods to decompose signals into frequency domain components like autocorrelation and the Heaviside calculus, in part because they didn't have a good intuitive understanding of the FFT. This paper is about developing that good intuitive understanding. Convention paper 10195. this as a published paper or article.
Another great paper on digital systems was by Tore Teigland and other members of Kristiania University in Oslo, "The Audibility of True Peak Distortion." There is a known issue when people are making digital files with peaks at 0dBFS, where they get reconstructed by the DAC to have peaks between samples that are just a little higher than those samples, and those peaks can often get clipped. Is this a problem? The authors do some listening testing on very loud recordings and do not find the effect to be very audible, although they had one test listener who could consistently hear them. Their basic response was to say that although it's probably not audible it's worthwhile to avoid them just in case it is audible elsewhere in the future. Convention Express Paper 301.
UWB is a spread-spectrum radio system for personal computers which provides high bandwidth short-term communication. In "Analysis of Ultra-Wide Band Wireless Audio Transceiver for High-Resolution Audio Transmission," Jeff Anderson and some others from Spark Microsystems do some listening tests and find that the sound quality of an uncompressed data stream (which you can do with UWB) sounds better and has better waveform fidelity than APT-X, APT-X LL, and LDAC-encoded data through Bluetooth (which does not have enough bandwidth for uncompressed 48ksamp/sec audio). This is not surprising in any way. This was definitely a marketing talk being passed off as a scientific paper, but the experiment was conducted well and the results were valid.... just completely expected. Convention Express Paper 271.
In Implementation of ADM-OSC v1.0, M. Delquignies and others from the AES standards committee talked about the new ADM-OSC standard. This is a "Lingua Franca" type of data encoding standard for object-oriented audio to allow devices with one proprietary standard to take audio created in some other proprietary standard. Although you hear a lot about Dolby Atmos in the press, there are actually a lot of different object-oriented audio standards in use out there and it's important to have one common method that everyone can use together. Convention Express Paper 264.
Mixing Class
COMPONENTS
Triad Transformers
A real disappointment of this year's show was the lack of component manufacturers. One of the thing that I like is going with other design engineers to talk to people making components. This year, Triad Transformers was the only component manufacturer there and while they tried hard to make up for the others we really missed folks like Electroswitch and Analog Devices. Triad, though, was showing a reissue of their HS series transformers including the famous HS-52 used as an interstage transformer in a lot of vintage gear like the Fairchild limiters. They are making them from the original drawings although with new tooling, using the original paper insulation and stick winding methods. It's very good to see original manufacturers keeping products like this around.
WORKSHOPS
In days of old, the AES had only the trade show upstairs and papers downstairs, and there was an exhibits-only ticket for just the trade show and an all-access badge for both. However, they have now added workshops and design briefs, which have been a great thing. These are not showing work in development but allow people to share about their work and methods of doing it and that is what the AES is about. The downside is that unlike papers these are only presentations and do not come with a written article about the work so if you weren't at the show all I can to is tell you what I got out of it and you can't go back and read anything from the author.
Along with these, though, come a new class of ticket, the Exhibits Plus ticket, which allows access to some workshops and not all and the people getting the tickets were never sure what they could get into and what they couldn't. I think this third tier is problematic and resulted in a lot of people talking about how they paid extra to get into everything and now they can't get into everything really. Some of the workshops were just spectacular so some of them missed a lot.
Restoring a DASH recorder panel
As part of the archival track, Gabriele Franzoso gave a workshop in which he talked about restoring a DASH digital tape machine for his employers at the National Library of Switzerland. They had an archive of many DASH tapes that they weren't able to play, and managed to find a used Studer D820 digital multi-track at a studio in South Africa. There were bad bearings to be replaced, many many Frako electrolytic capacitors that had failed, a power transformer that was open, and of course the pinch roller was bad. Once he got all of that dealt with, the machine would power up but only with error messages because the EPROMs that held the controller firmware were bad. Studer had the original firmware files and so it was possible to burn new EPROMs and after this the machine would pass audio on some channels but not all. By swapping boards they could locate the problem to the board level, then by swapping chips and modules on the boards they could locate them further. It turned out that were were failed ICs on the timebase corrector modules on many channels but they were able to locate newer versions of these proprietary ASICs on the Chinese aftermarket... and they worked! It was impressive to watch what went into getting the machine running because there was no magic, just a huge amount of slow and careful work.
There was a student presentation by Kayla Briet called Soundsystem As Survival and Resistance: A Black, Afro-Asian, and Indigenous Audio History. She talked a bit about the history of the Jamaican soundsystems that started appearing after WWII and which still make an important part of the musical scene there, as well as a bit about how radio has been an important cultural support for indigenous communities all over. Unfortunately she showed up late for the talk and was not able to do a tech run through, and her actual presentation was marred by most of her material being video which could not be shown due to technical problems than even Leslie Ann Jones could not fix. Still it was an interesting idea and I'd like to see it better under better circumstances.
Bob McCarty from Meyer Sound gave a talk called Case Studies: Large Scale Sound Reinforcement: Festivals in which he described systems from a number of huge festivals including Roskilde, Outside Lands, Download, and even the large scale outdoor system used for the New York Philharmonic in Central Park. Getting sound to the audience without getting it to the neighbors is difficult in the best of circumstances outdoors and he talked a lot about methods used to get clear coverage across the audience without leakage, including delay towers, directional subwoofer arrays, and the use of terrain and layout to your advantage. As someone who has worked a lot of smaller festivals over the years it was fun to see what was possible on a larger scale.
Glass diaphragms and cones for speakers
And, Kwinkut Chan from GAIT was talking about Revolutionizing Loudspeaker Design with Ultra Thin Glass Technology. It was a marketing talk, and I complain about that all the time in the papers sessions but it worked well as a workshop. GAIT is a company in Taiwan that is making small speaker cones for tweeters and midrange drivers out of an ion-impregnated glass like Gorilla Glass. The test items he displayed were very thin and light, but also very rigid, and they did not ring when tapped as one would want from a speaker cone. I am always skeptical about new speaker materials and I am still recovering from some manufacturers' attempts to make aluminum-cone woofers back in the eighties, but this looks at least like it is worth investigating. They don't have any driver manufacturers using the material yet but they are at the show looking to find some.
A team including Gabe Herman from the University of Hartford, Andrew Keating from Cosmic Perspectives, and Benny Burtt from Skywalker sound talked about the Science and Practice of Recording Rockets which I thought was especially exciting because of the way they were approaching the task. I have recorded rockets and aircraft for engineering work where specific engineering data needed to be captured, but these folks were interested in capturing the best possible version of the experience for a listener. Consequently their recording methods included multiple mikes, dynamic compression and control, and other stuff required to get the best possible simulacrum of the experience. They weren't trying to make an objectively accurate reproduction of the waveform, but trying to capture the subjective experience for the listener. "Making a big thing small so that you can hear it" is how they described it. It was as much Hollywood style sound design as classical recording.
Due to the compressibility of air, you can only get sounds to be so loud before they become distorted and then eventually clip due to Kelvin-Helmholtz shear sensitivity. So what is accurate? And of course the listener's ears also become nonlinear at a far lower level so what is accurate there?
The team is using conventional Sennheiser RF microphones like the MKH418 shotgun which introduces a whole new set of oddness due to the uneven airflow through the interference tubes at high levels and the nonlinearity of the RF discriminator electronics up there. Does this help or hinder accuracy and what is accuracy anyway?
I found the talk and the discussion afterward interesting because it centers so much on what subjective accuracy really means and it did so in a context far different than the music recording world that we normally think about.
TECH TOURS
This year there were a good number of tech tours although they were announced fairly late in the game. All of them were very well attended which goes to show how much interest there is in these. I took a tour of the Amazon studio down in Brooklyn which had a small SSL-based mixdown room and a small performance space.
DATA STORAGE
Over on the NAB side there were a lot of people selling large data storage systems, some of them cloud-based and some of them physical systems for local use. Large scale storage is more of a worry for video folks who need to deal with very large video files, but it is also an issue for people doing audio production especially in the broadcast world.
Western Digital Ultrastar and WD Gold drives are the same actual products, rebadged for different sales channels (much like the Electro-Voice PL and RE series microphones). These are the server grade drives formerly made by HGST before Western Digital bought them and they are now available in sizes up to 24 terabytes for people with a lot of media to store.
Seagate also had some folks there and while they weren't showing off the Exos rotating media, they were showing a device called the Exos Corvault, which allows 160 individual disks to be mounted into as 4U chassis and configured into one or more arrays. Again, this is a product welcome in a world where studios and broadcasters are needing more and more storage every minute.
CONCLUSION
It was a good show, it presented some good opportunities to visit NYC and see the Met and hear the Birdland Big Band as well as to hang out with audio professionals that I only see once or twice a year. It was smaller than usual and a lot of vendors have been kept away at the high price of exhibiting at the Javits. For a hall where licensed union electricians are required to plug a lamp or appliance in for you, I sure saw a lot of electrical code violations in there. It wasn't like in the days when Ampex had a two-story booth dominating the trade show, but it wasn't like the days when Full Sail had an Elvis impersonator on the show floor with a PA that made it impossible to carry on a conversation in most of the hall either. I am glad I went and you should go too. The next one is in Long Beach California next fall, with a smaller European show in beautiful Warsaw in the spring.
