There used to be more workshops. More practical presentations. There is a large DIY audio builders community. There could be a lot more having to do with that. The "When Vinyl Ruled" exhibit was about 20 years ago now. It's a totally different landscape now. Something along those lines I'm sure would be welcome. Those are just two areas I'm involved in that I would like to see more of. There are certainly many more areas I'm not involved that I would like to know more about.

I think there is a general malaise around most tech now, people are saturated and constantly covered with garbage. I feel for the innovators, why spend the time and effort only to have the IP copied or stolen.

With recorded audio, most don't seem to care about quality either, close enough is good enough, listening is not critical.

Its hard to generate enthusiasm for shows or lectures or meetings. Face to face meeting is still the most valuable form of learning and experience sharing.

Well I'm glad these day I don't have to do 4 AES shows round the globe every year!

I always thought they were an odd group. Having worked at the highest levels in pretty much every area they cover, I'm staggered at the lack of interaction I have with them.

They remind me of the role playing board game society at school. The strange ones. Rarely see them.

Doing the AES in NY as an exhibitor used to cost me $30k + ever time. Not sure how great the return was.

Global trade fairs seem a bit old school in this age, and think of the environment.

I'll still take a NAMM in the cold January..

Indeed, the environment was always strange. I can do without Steven Slate yelling at a crowd with a headset mic like some flea market huckster trying to sell me a shamwow, or JJP walking around wearing his feather boa. And who was that other guy who used to rep Dangerous all the time - the one who would wear the shiny purple glitter outfit like the second coming of Prince...

Yeah seeing the same people doing the same schtick over and over again get boring real quick.

I was quite mean to Mr Slate when he launched, and took the p*ss for the whole show (mostly about his touch screen). This was childish and I regret it. ( A tiny bit)

Meeting lots of famous Audio people from the US was a mixed bag and a few household names have got away with some truly awful production work over the years but still get props on this site. I wont name them as I'm trying not be childish (see above re: Slate)

But did get to have lovely informative interesting times with top people like Georg Massenburg and Dave Hill.

Received reports on the 2024 AES convention from every quarter. From U.S. and European perspectives.

All the reports mentioned how small the show was this year.

That's not appealing to me.

Funnily enough Mr Plush is on my list of US audio types I would not mind running into at a trade fair!

I have watched them shrink year by year the shows...

Ys, I miss the days of Fletcher and "Alesis on a stick".
(As well as sneaking into a Meyer Sound private party because my girlfriend at the time looked like Helen Meyer .)

The committee chooses the papers that are presented but I have never seen a reasonably competent paper ever get turned down. They can only present what gets submitted, and if you want to see interesting stuff then get people doing interesting stuff to submit papers!

This year there were vast, vast numbers of students and I think that's a good thing, but the AES is spending a lot of effort on educational workshops for the students and that is effort that could have been directed elsewhere. I can't tell if this is good or bad.
--scott

Youngster! You missed Paul Klipsch pulling out a sign that said "BULLSHIT" and waving it around in the middle of a paper. There have been so many papers that I have attended over the years when I wished he had been there with that sign. And Norm Pickering asking "Have you considered ohms law?" in the politest possible way. There were giants treading the earth in those days...
--scott

speaking of alesis: their appearance at the (musikmesse frankfurt and at) aes conventions here in europe was so strange that people believed they had fallen into the clutches of a cult...

...and in later years, you could marvel at similar strange appearance of protools/digidesign/avid - btw: what are they currently called?

Well, given that I am three days away from my 78th birthday, I hardly think I qualify as "youngster" (ah, but if wishes...).
But yes, I would have loved to have been there to hear Klipsch. Unfortunately back some 40 years ago when I started to take this recording thing seriously (i.e. people started wanting to pay me to record them), I had never heard of AES, let alone their conventions. I started going around '94 (IIRC) and then only to the west coast ones.

BTW Scott, you and I met a couple of times at those AES events. I was active in rec.audio.pro somewhere along that time and your posts were ones that I eagerly looked forward to.

Thank you so much! I hope to see you in Long Beach next year!
--scott

AND... here's the review!

https://positive-feedback.com/show-r...4-show-report/


--scott

Thank you, Scott
Excellent
Excellent

It seems like this is the right time to post my own AES report. I wrote the first draft soon after returning home, but decided that I'd wait to post it because I did not want to "scoop" Scott's published report.

Show Report: AES NYC 2024

As Hudson noted upthread, this year's AES show was very small. I suspect that made it pretty cool for the students who showed up (you could get a badge by doing volunteer work). Even if they only spent a day there, they'd have rubbed shoulders with a lot of their engineering and producing heros: Chuck Ainley, George Massenburg, Josh Roggen, Andrew Shepps, and many others.

We're still in the thrall of the "Immersive" recording boom, and the ADAM-sponsored demo room was full the entire time, with folks outside waiting for someone to leave. Based on my own interests, I heard presentations with demos by David Bowles, Paul Geluso, and Hyunkook Lee.

NYU's graduate students are currently on an organ recording kick, and they gave presentations about several different experiments they'd tried. Some of these were variations on the increasingly common "cube" format; some involved combining one several higher-order Ambisonics or multichannel sphere mics. I spoke with several of them and said that I feel we've been over-emphasizing the immersive / ambience features of the format to the detriment of source localization. I mentioned that many stereo and surround practitioners long ago gave up on doing both jobs with the same array, hence the widespread use of main arrays combined with a separate ambience strategy such as a distant AB pair or Hamasaki square. Their professor, Paul Geluso, mentioned that they've been tending towards significantly smaller cube dimensions in pursuit of less image ambiguity.

The odd thing about immersive production is that almost nobody hears what the mix engineer hears. Something like 95% of listeners, including the client, never hear anything but a binaural rendering. Bob Katz, Morten Lindberg, and some other panelists agreed that the sonic result is basically a cluster-f*** because the Dolby and Apple renderers don't sound at all similar and both add unacceptable coloration to anything in the height channels. Andrew Shepps stated that, while he constantly references his mixes on headphones, he always considers the speaker mix to be the definitive "sound for the ages". "It seems like all these commercial renderers are based on old hearing models from the 1970's," groused one panelist. This creates the need for some kind of "least common denominator" mixing, in hopes of making something that sounds tolerable on all platforms. Huyunkook Lee has given up on those commercial encoders entirely. He and his APL colleagues have built their own binaural renderer for use in the field, now offered commercially as APL Virtuoso.

The AES show floor was pretty disappointing. I'd heard that a new version of Pyramix would be shown in the Neumann booth, and I wanted to talk to them about Dante firmware for their Neumann-labeled Anubis, but I never found the booth. In fact, the only U47 I saw on display during the whole show was a comparison unit in the Telefunken booth. I later found out that Neumann had set up an off-site demo room. Who knew? Perhaps “important” customers. Even if I’d been told, attending off-site demonstrations takes a huge chunk out of the day and I had myself pretty tightly scheduled.

Schoeps had their usual "counter" booth, where the only new thing was an improved shock mount. I've never seen Helmut Wittek looking so bored. The shock mount is good though: more secure and less fiddley than "lyre" mounts. Throw away your original Schoeps shock mounts immediately.

Austrian Audio had some dynamics and some headphones in addition to their excellent OC818 and related SDC's. Was any of this new? I dunno; I don't much care about buying dynamic mics these days.
Josephson Engineering was a no-show, as was DPA -- though a distributor had some of their compact mics on display. AEA was there, seemingly without Wes Dooley. Once you pass 80, you’re allowed to stay home. AEA have a pair of new DI's, designed by Fred Forsell. They also had two of their 500 series ribbon preamps displayed in a two-space vertical card cage, which seemed to be getting more attention than the preamps. Grace Design has also announced a new DI box, but they weren't at the show.

Beesneez didn't come this year; it's an expensive proposition when you're traveling from down "the land down under". I understand they’re going to NAAM instead. There was another LDC mic vendor I'd never heard of before and can't remember now. It's now quite easy to use OEM parts and offer your own LDC, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

One person who gets a pass from me is Derek at Vanguard Microphones, who's made a couple of interesting limited-edition mics using BeesNeez capsules. Vanguard didn't have an AES booth this year. As I write this, he's in Denver, demonstrating a new variable bias valve mic, the V14, along with his V24 stereo mic, which is sort of a C24 on steroids. Unfortunately, I'm still in NYC because I'd planned dinner with a client the night after the show ended.

Dangerous Audio shared a booth with Manley Labs. (Yes, @ ionian , your favorite purple ostrich was there.) I've not seen Eve Anna Manley working the booth in several years now. It's good to be queen.

I was actually on the show floor looking for Dante-capable mastering DAC's. There's only one that I know of, the latest version of Burl Audio's B2 Bomber DAC, but Burl did not come to AES this year. I had a nice conversation with Sonifex, who offer their AVN series of Dante I/O boxes in various point counts from one channel to sixteen. Their one and two-channel I/O boxes actually have good specs, in contrast to the Audinate and Neutrik ones, which are only good enough for streaming playback in a Chipotle restaurant. They are just XLR termination nodes, though, they don’t have volume knobs or any other mastering-oriented features.

Frustrated in my search, I crossed over to the NAB show floor, found the Audinate booth, and buttonholed their OEM sales manager. “Nobody makes a 192k-capable mastering DAC, and it’s your fault!” He heard me out as I explained that his high point-count Brooklyn boards are complete overkill for a two-channel mastering DAC (the economics don’t work) and his low point count Dante chipsets top out at 96k. When he offered that their IP solutions can be ported to a FPGA, I explained that mastering converters are boutique products, designed by small teams of one to three engineers whose design expertise is primarily analog. They generally can’t justify hiring a dedicated FPGA engineer to develop something that’s going to sell only a hundred units a year. He promised to have someone from his OEM design team call me but, as of January, that hasn’t happened.

Many attendees probably missed the big gear news of the show. Millennia Media founder John La Grou was holding court at a walk-up counter in a small booth and telling those who cared to ask that his new D1 multi-path DAC, branded “immersiv” would begin shipping in 1Q25. Yet another DAC – who cares? I’ll tell you who cares: pretty much every famous mastering engineer who’s heard the thing. John has had several dozen Beta-test units out on loan to such people for the past year to get their feedback. Typical comment: “Tell me how much I need to pay for this thing, because you are not getting it back!” What’s so special about it? Well, let’s start with the fact that it combines two converter paths with different scale factors to achieve a 170 dB dynamic range. That's a very simple idea whose engineering implementation is dauntingly difficult, so I was immediately skeptical.

Me: “C’mon, John, what’s the noise floor?”
He: “-142 dBu”
Me: “What a minute! That’s below the theoretical noise floor for 50 ohm resistor…”
He: “We use a 5-ohm summing resistor to combine the two DAC paths.”
Me: “Oh… but what about the noise of the output stage?”
He: “That is the output stage!”

We’re now at the point where a typical Gearspace thread devolves into shouts of “Nobody can possibly hear that!” My personal rule is that I don’t lecture mastering engineers about what they can or can’t hear. In this case, they seem to be in pretty clear agreement that there’s something special about the immersive DAC prototypes they’ve been living with for several months now. Positive Feedback has just published the first review of this product, authored by none other than Bob Katz. It's not just his opinion either (although there’s plenty of that); he shows bench test data, and it's darn impressive.

In one way, my visit to AES 2024 was a bust: I’d gone hoping to find Dante-connected mastering DAC that can do 192k playback and I never found one. The consolation prize is that I found one whose THD+N figure bests the closest contender by something like 40 dB and whose total dynamic range is so wide that you can use an undithered digital volume control for playback. We’ve never had that before, and I didn’t even think it was possible.

David L. Rick

You should have done it! I got stuck waiting for scans from the film lab which since Covid has gone from 24-hour turnaround to four-week turnaround.

And I double every comment about the quality of the binaural renderers. They sound great for some people, but awful for most people, and I have talked to people who assure me that "binaural recording can't present height cues" because they have never heard a renderer that was even close to their own HRTF. If anything will make or break object-oriented audio formats, it is the quality of the binaural renderers because that is how people today listen.

I have no interest in a Schoeps shock mount because I have been using Shure shock mounts on my Schoeps mikes for years and they are blameless. Schoeps is a few decades too late.
--scott

Lol At least some things never change. There's a lack of characters at AES ever since Dave Hill moved to the great beyond and took his leather shorts with him, and Peter Janis (Also passed this summer) - a man, who conversations with I used to measure in NDPM (Name Drops per Minute) sold Radial to Ultimate.

At least the purple ostrich keeps on keeping on. This makes me smile lol.