 |
| Manufacturer News | Products | Home |
|
Features
Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3 Where are all these people coming from, and why are they always in front of me at the Starbucks concessions? This convention looks set to break a few attendance records, so I’d better get to it. Today offers a predominance of enveloping sessions, literally and figuratively. “Surround Sound: The Beginning, 1925-1940,” presented by sound designer Robert Auld, will comprise an assessment of the medium’s origin and early work at Bell Labs and Disney, while for “Surround Sound: Quadraphonic Sound in The 1970s—Recording Classical Music,” Auld will be joined by Andrew Kazdin, Charles Repka and Max Wilcox, to consider four-channel/quad sound for the home which, if you can believe it, resulted in no less than five competitive disc formats. Makes Blu-ray versus HD DVD look like a walk in the park. The Workshop Session “Evaluation of Surround Main Mikings for Classical Orchestra,” chaired by Mick Sawaguchi from Pioneer Corporation, will report on the interesting findings of an AES Japan Surround Study Project that analyzed 15 different combinations of main and ambience mic setups that were recorded to Pro Tools|HD. Each setup will be auditioned during the presentation; participants will be invited to comment on the results. This afternoon, industry veteran Ken Hahn from Sync Sound will host a Master Class, “Advanced Ideas and Techniques in High-Definition Surround Music Post Production for Film and Television,” whose title says it all. I predict a lively Q&A session. The Broadcast Session, “Audio For HDTV: Dialnorm,” chaired by Andy Butler, will allow Mike Babbitt from Dolby Laboratories and Tim Carroll from Linear Acoustic to duke it out again as they beg to differ about who’s to blame for incorrectly implemented metadata and those annoying level jumps. Content providers cannot agree on how to correctly set Dialnorm; networks use different values for affiliate distribution. And there is no consistency at the station level. Might it be time for sanity to prevail? And so to my Top Three Innovations at the 123rd Convention from some of the smaller fry. In no particular order, I nominate Audinate, Bricasti Design and Qualis Audio. The Australian firm Audinate (Booth 1205) has been quietly working on an ultra-low latency digital audio networking technology—known as Dante—and a very clever Zen automatic device discovery and system configuration protocol. Put succinctly, Dante enables simple plug-and-play networking of digital audio; it has already been licensed to Dolby and Lab:gruppen. A truly remarkable breakthrough. Bricasti Design (Booth 148) from the minds of those clever chaps who brought us the classic Lexicon processors, have been wowing attendees with the Model 7 stereo effects unit, which includes no less that six Analog Devices SHARC Blackfin DSP chips for the floating-point heavy lifting, and produces results from its extensive effects library that...well, have to be heard to be believed. A remote control is also under development. Not to be missed. Qualis Audio (Booth 1251) has been working for a while on a new Auditor SPA-201 surround monitor controller, which offers useful analysis and control functions, in addition to automated monitoring of system “nasties.” As well as simulating a number of consumer environments, the system includes a neat readout that simultaneously displays surround, stereo and mono signal levels, including (deep breath) spatial and spectral distribution, plus conventional level and phase information. Bright minds at work here. And, finally, a tip of the marketing hat to SSL (Booth 154) for the brash “Shed of your Dreams,” a Summerwood construction modeled on company co-owner Peter Gabriel’s garden shed in which he wrote many of his best songs, except that this one contains a fully functional recording studio. Prices start at $250K. If you have been, thanks for listening. See you in Amsterdam and San Francisco. Industry veteran Mel Lambert heads up Media&Marketing, a consulting service for pro-audio firms and facilities. www.MediaandMarketing.com. Top of Page |
|
||||||||||||||||||
©2007 NewBay Media LLC |
||||||||||||||||||||
