It’s officially spooky season, dear readers! While you’re busy carving headphone designs into your pumpkins 🎃 and hiding loudspeakers in them to scare your neighbors with a Boo! of the highest sound quality, let us at Shively Acoustics International (SAI) be the first to hand out a treat 🍬 — the latest edition of our blog, of course.

While Halloween may still await us at the end of October, the beginning of the month has already proven festive for the world of Audio. First, there was the COMSOL Conference 2024 in Boston, and soon after came the AES Show 2024 NY, offering audioheads the world over a combined six days of intense industry interaction — our favorite. What follows are some of the highlights from Roger and SAI’s trip out east. Let’s start with COMSOL, held from October 2 to 4.

Anyone who has worked with Shively Acoustics knows that we are experts when it comes to using COMSOL’s simulation software. And as a certified consultant, the “modeling and simulation event of the year” was a must-attend for SAI, especially considering that it was the first in-person conference in five years! It was good to be back.

In his Day 1 keynote address, Bjorn Sjodin (Senior Vice-President of Product Management) delivered an update to the more than 200 attendees on all that is fresh and new with version 6.3 of the Multiphysics modeling software. He also set the course for what was, reports Roger, to dominate the conference: acoustics.

Exciting stuff! Find out more in Roger’s coverage in The Audio Voice (Photo: SAI)

Certainly a highlight for our acoustically inclined president, the Acoustics Module was, as Roger put it, “upfront and center” throughout. He wasted no time on the first day in reporting back his excitement about the innovative module, specifically that it’s the only module out there “to add the explicit time domain solution with the aid of the graphics processing unit (GPU), when an NVIDIA card is present”, resulting in a solution time that is 25 times faster than it would be without the GPU. At risk of piling on more technical jargon here, it suffices to say that for those in the know, this difference has wide-reaching implications; a breath-taking significance, to further paraphrase the SAI chief-turned-reporter.

Another standout was the keynote “Acoustic Simulation for Immersive Audio”, presented by Sonos Distinguished Audio System Engineer Doug Button and Lead Simulations Engineer Joe Jankovsky. For all the juicy details on that, and much, much more that was on offer at COMSOL this year, we direct you to Roger’s coverage of the conference for industry magazine and SAI partner audioXpress; the piece initially appeared in the Editor’s Desk of issue #488 of their weekly online newsletter, The Audio Voice.

His article is already getting positive feedback, we might add, as Bernt Nilsson (COMSOL President) and Sjodin articulated succinctly in an email, calling the coverage “impressive” and exclaiming “Roger is amazing!” Toot, toot, toot goes our own horn, sure, but what it shows is that the ongoing collaboration with audioXpress covering the industry is having some impact. Good, because there’s plenty more where that came from!

Back to the Big Apple

After some downtime well spent with his granddaughters & co. in the Hoosier State, Roger steered the SAI train back to the East Coast for the AES Show 2024, organized by the Audio Engineering Society and held from October 8 to 10 in New York. Much was on the to-do list for the three days, as Roger was a triple-representative all at once for audioXpress, Shively Acoustics, and, of course, the Audio Product Development Alliance (APDA). Here is but a taste.

Roger and gold medalist Gil! (right; Photo: SAI)

Registrations were reportedly up this year for the AES Show, with the opening ceremony on Day 1 at full capacity — occupying an estimated 300 theater seats — and upwards of 1,000 visitors to the convention each day.

The highlight of the ceremony undoubtedly was SAI-affiliate and Camden Labs CEO Gilbert Soulodre winning the AES Gold Medal Award. In his own words, Gil won the award for “being old”. Jokes aside, the AES awards the gold medal “in recognition of outstanding achievements, sustained over a period of years, in the field of Audio Engineering”. Well done, Gil! 🥇 Roger and Gil last caught up at the AES Automotive Audio conference this past summer in Gothenburg, as mentioned in our blog post from July.

A schedule for upcoming events was also announced, among them AES Europe 2025 and the AES Show 2025, to be held in Warsaw, Poland, from May 24-25, and in Long Beach, California, from October 23-25 next year, respectively. Save the dates! 📝

Music producer and engineer Ebonie Smith gave an inspiring keynote address titled “WOKE. Why? Opportunity. Kinship. Equity.” in which she discussed the new challenges of economic change in the audio and recording industry, the part A.I. is playing, and the need for improving both working conditions and pay of audio engineers. Follow her @eboniesmithmusic on Instagram for more.

Day 1 concluded over dinner with Sennheiser, who recently acquired leading digital audio manufacturer Merging Technologies in 2022 via their subsidiary Neumann. Merging Tech premiered Pyramix 15, the latest version of their digital audio workstation (DAW), which continues to be the top choice for high-quality audio production, as Roger put it.

As a fun aside: also at the dinner were Grammy award-winning recording engineers Jim Anderson and Bob Friedrich, whose anecdotes Roger eagerly ate up, particularly those about Jim’s years at NPR in the 1970s and 80s.

📝Update: In-vehicle Measurements Whitepaper📝

The TC-AA got an update from Jayant Datta on the progress of the collaborative industry project, which covers three areas of interest: Frequency Response, Max SPL, and Impulsive Direction — with sections on microphone and microphone arrays used.

On its way to becoming a technical document, its current version is now accessible, with source material downloadable for testing. For the next version, more data acquisition submissions are expected to be uploaded for analysis, and Jayant encourages all to take part!

Access the beta tester package here and upload your files — including notes on your setup and conditions, etc. — in the Acquisitions folder. 🤝🤝

For most of Day 2, Roger removed his reporter cap in favor of SAI- and APDA-related matters. The morning saw a meeting of the AES Automotive Audio Technical Committee (TC-AA) for a debrief of the Gothenburg conference (mission: successful) and, among other things (see sidebar), the upcoming AES conventions in Europe and the US. For these, our president — Vice-Chair at Gothenburg, you may recall — reiterated the desire to add both automotive and audio product development tracks at these conventions to keep the momentum building for automotive, while also reviving interest in product development topics for engineering and research.

This idea carried over into Roger’s afternoon meeting with AES Executive Director Emily Burch, from which we can report positive interest from the Society’s management and leadership for a sustained partnership with the APDA; on the to-do list now is writing a proposal for what that relationship could look like. A separate proposal has also been requested for curating a Product Development track for the AES Show in Long Beach next year. For now, Roger foresees the track comprising three themes — one for each day of the convention — namely Automotive, Loudspeakers/Microphones, and DSP/Simulation.

Day number two ended with dinner number two, this time with Panasonic, who have expressed interest in renewing our support role with them. Business never sleeps — Shively Acoustics, at your service!

Day 3 was all about reconnecting on the exhibition floor. A highlight here was SPARK Microsystems and their ultra-wide band (UWB) wireless transceivers. Industry expert Jeff Anderson presented his research with a comparison of audio transmission data of UWB versus a traditional S/PDIF wire link, showing that UWB is nearly indistinguishable from a wired connection — impressive. Roger also learned that SPARK will have a suite at CES 2025 this coming January, where their pop-up studio will showcase UWB in an array of headset and speaker demos — an endeavor that has seen $15 million spent in development!

Getting immersive with John La Grou (left) and Nathan Fuller (Photo: SAI)

Another stop among the countless was Imersiv, who Roger talked with about a unique way to solve the dual DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) issue for high- and low-resolution audio. We are also happy to report that Imersiv looked us up afterwards, and have since reached out expressing an interest in a possible future relationship for design-related consultations.

For the full scoop on the AES Show NY, well, you know where to look: keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming Editor’s Desk in one of the next Audio Voice newsletters! 📰

That about wraps up the candy—err, the blog, dear readers. What will you be dressing up as for Halloween this year? How about an acoustic engineer? Sound designer? Maybe a mixing technician? No, no, wait, don’t tell us… a comically oversized loudspeaker?

Whatever you choose, make it scary good! ■

Shively Acoustics International — Modern Audio Solutions, Worldwide

All Hallows’ Eve-nts

Back to the Big Apple

Webinars in the Works

Allied in Audio