Christopher Struck
The 117th AES Convention, to be held October 28 – 31 in San Francisco, has announced a program of 14 workshops, coordinated by workshop co-chairs Christopher Struck and David Harris.
Dave Harris
Testing Car Audio Quality (Thursday, October 28) will include a series of unique evaluation clinics of high quality 5.1 automobile audio and movie playback systems. Chaired by Tim Nind of Harman-Becker (UK), the workshop will explore design, data analysis and dependency of system architecture. Results of these clinics will be reported at the 118th AES Convention in Barcelona in May 2005.
Field Recording in the Wild (Thursday, October 28) will address the rapidly disappearing natural soundscapes which comprise one of our planet’s most fragile acoustic constituencies. Chaired by Bernie Krause, field recordist with Wild Sanctuary, Glen Ellen, CA, the Workshop will explore extraordinary measures employed to capture these precious audible environments.
On Friday, Oct. 29, Mark Davis of Dolby Laboratories, Inc., SF will chair Spatial Coding of Surround Sound, a Progress Report. The rise in popularity of surround sound has resulted in a duality of formats. As both stereo and 5.1 now enjoy wide acceptance, it has become necessary to implement a common data format. The workshop will provide an overview of the principles of such systems and examine some of the primary problems and solutions of systems currently under development.
On Sunday, Oct. 31 Dana Massie of Waves Inc., London, will chair Future Challenges for the All-Software Studio: Scalability, Stability, Usability. With the rapid maturity of the all-software studio the engineer’s fundamental mode of interaction has changed drastically. Today’s studio modules are frequently plug-ins which enable the creation of digital effects with an ease and quality that has no counterpart in the analog world. The workshop will explore issues ranging from an operating system crash in the middle of a billable session to how a pro studio can incrementally add more processing power and, obstacles to entry for new engineers.
Additional 117th AES Convention Workshops include: High Resolution Audio In An Age of Universal Playback; Firewire In Studios – Benefits And Challenges; Mastering For Low Bit-Rate Perceptual CODECS; How We Made Games In The Hallway Rock!; Architectural Acoustics for Film & Broadcast Studios; Which Audio Recording & Storage Medium for What Purpose; The Power of Loudspeaker Models; Signal Processing and Hearing Aids; The Role of Multiple Low-Frequency Signals in the Perception of Reproduced Sound; Lossless Audio Coding: MPEG & De-Facto Standards.
A complete schedule of AES Convention events can be found at www.aes.org.
