AES Journal | Jeff Vautin

AES127 So it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to post here, but I just got back from a weekend of AES and I need to report on the happenings.

I made it down Thursday night and stayed until the end of the program on Monday: four long days at the convention and a great time catching up with friends both living in New York and visiting for the show.

If you haven’t been to an AES convention, they’re broken up into two distinct parts: a trade show, with equipment designers and manufacturers showing off their new products, and a technical session, where industry professionals and research can share their recent work. Usually you can cover the trade show in a day, though this year it took a lot less time. Through some combination of the economy and industry politics many manufacturers did not attend; I think the most conspicuous absence was Digidesign, since they usually have a huge booth with half hourly product demos. For me the highlights here included the Shure booth, where I got to check out their new ribbon mics and visit with old colleagues, and the Grace Design booth, where they were showing off their new 500-series preamps.

The technical program was a little quieter than usually, but much more lively than the exhibit floor. Some of my personal highlights were the Max for Live presentation, the Headphone and Earphone Measurement Tutorial, David Berner’s presentation on emulation of analog hardware in DSP, and a number of papers I had a chance to catch.

I’m planning to write a bit about some of the presentations I saw, so stay posted. Also, hopefully this will be the beginning of a more regular posting schedule.

The May AES Journal just dropped, and there are a few articles that look intriguing. The first is a measure of objective speech intelligibility that will work with perceptual coding algorithms - definitely something needed since STI fails with perceptual coders. They recommend some amendments to the ITU standard to handle the perceptual encoders.

There’s an article discussing the optimum bandwidth for AM and FM broadcasting. For speech and classical music listeners preferred lower bandwidths of 5-7KHz - it seems that the lower bandwidth reduces noise from nearby channels. For listening to ‘highly compressed’ music, like rock, most listeners could not tell the difference between 7 KHz of bandwidth and 10 KHz of bandwidth… interesting. I’ve been observing the same thing recently: many people just don’t pay attention to the content above 8 KHz. It’s a shame - I think that’s my favorite part.

For loudspeaker designers there’s an article about the impact of heating in the voice coil of speakers, and the impact it has on sound level and damping. The result, as expected, is compression of the output, but the frequency response was also impacted by the damping changes.

Journal of the AES - May 2009

The 127th AES Convention is going down October 9-12, 2009, back in Javits Convention Center in NY!