The 2024 AES (Audio Engineering Society) convention took place in the Javits Center in New York this past October, in conjunction with the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention, which focuses on television, radio broadcast, and video technologies. These two events showcase the latest in hardware and software technologies, and offer seminars that cover a wide range of cutting edge topics and research. (I didn’t cover NAB except to quickly walk through the exhibit floor.)
My main takeaways from AES this year:
You can always learn something at one of these shows, usually many things.
Those of you who are concerned that high-end audio will disappear when older audiophiles age out need not worry. There was an abundance of younger people at AES, and they had tremendous enthusiasm and energy. They are the future of audio, and the future looks bright. High-end audio gear as we know it (the kind you see at shows like AXPONA) may change or perhaps fade, but the desire for good sound will not. I’m confident there will always be products that deliver outstanding sound, though perhaps in forms we can’t even imagine today.
The AES show was smaller in size than the last few years, and there were no big booths from major companies this time, while NAB has now grown to be bigger than AES. I suppose it’s a sign of our videocentric, social media, video on demand streaming age, and economic factors I can’t parse at this time.
The show was well-attended.
The video production hardware at NAB, like this Blackmagic suite for example, was dizzying in its capabilities and variety.
Here are highlights of what I encountered at AES.
Imersiv, a new brand from microphone and phono preamp company Millennia, showed what they say is the world’s first 28-bit DAC. The D-1 DAC utilizes a multi-path architecture, a configuration that company head John LaGrou said took 10 years to develop. As he said, “the general idea isn’t new but it’s so wickedly hard that nobody has ever succeeded in doing it (to my knowledge).” How it works: 64-bit DSP splits an incoming digital signal into two “dynamic paths” that handle the high-level and low-level aspects of the signal. The low-level portion is up-shifted to a higher signal level, which allows the signals to be converted to the highest-quality bit range of a D/A converter. The two split signals are then recombined.
The Imersiv D-1 DAC.
This multi-path process translates to what Imersiv states is “vanishingly low” noise and THD at low program levels. What the process claims, and what I heard, is greater low-level detail resulting in exceptional spatiality, what I noted as “fantastic” clarity, and heightened realism. The specs are impressive: true 28-bit resolution, greater than 170 dB dynamic range, and greater than 170 dB linearity. The D-1 is slated to ship around January 2025 at about $12,000. The patent-pending multi-path process can work in the entire signal chain, and an advisory board has been formed to license multi-path technology.
Chord is a name familiar to audiophiles, and they had a presence at AES 2024. The company has introduced its Alto nearfield monitor/headphone amplifier ($4,250), which delivers 50 watts into 4 ohms, can drive four headphones at the same time, and has the characteristic Chord compact and distinctive design. Though aimed at pro users, it’s suitable for home use as well. I listened to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” through Audeze LCD-1 planar magnetic headphones, and the sound was smooth, warm and richly addictive.
Speaking of Audeze, the company debuted their CRBN2 (“Carbon”) high-end electrostatic headphones ($5,995), which will be shipping at an undetermined date. I’ll throw out the tired audiophile descriptions and just say they sounded sublime, thanks to second-generation carbon nanotube drivers and SLAM (Symmetric Linear Acoustic Modulator) bass-improvement technology (the Audeze website doesn’t go into details). Current CRBN owners can have their headphones updated to CRBN2 status for $995 until February 1, 2025.
Audeze's CRBN2 electrostatic headphones.
Designing a loudspeaker is an extremely challenging balancing act. I say this as preface to a remarkable demonstration I witnessed by TOA Electronics with the US debut of their ME-50FS professional monitor speaker (pricing TBA). It was developed in Japan as a reference for their in-house listening. The speaker is modestly proportioned (about 12 by 15 by 13.5 inches) and utilizes two 4-inch cone woofers and a 1-inch tweeter in an enclosure with a unique triangular bass reflex port, said to suppress port “squeal.” The three drivers are positioned close to one another for optimal localization and phase response. The ME-50FS is powered by a built-in Class D amplifier. It’s available with dedicated stands.
The TOA ME-50FS loudspeaker system and stands.
When I first walked into the demo room the TOA people asked if I would listen to the speaker with and without these mysterious (to me) rectangular boxes connected, and give them my opinion. I said I certainly would. Without the boxes, the speakers sounded excellent, with superb clarity and tonality and a surprising amount of bass and dynamic power, especially considering the small woofer size. With the outboard boxes connected, the sound became more spacious and more detailed, with more precise imaging, and nuances like the piano player’s left and right hands, reverb trails, and the articulation of the bass easier to hear. The sound simply became closer into making you feel like you were hearing the real thing.
So, what do those boxes do? It turns out they house an impedance correction circuit, to compensate for the impedance irregularities of the drivers and crossover. The correction is done in the analog domain – this sounds better to the designers than using DSP. As I noted, speaker design is a balancing act between the impedance of the speakers at various frequencies, crossover points and slopes, phase response, on-and off-axis response, and many other factors, all of which interact with one another. I could not believe the sonic improvement that the ME-50FS impedance correction unit created. The measurements of the ME-50FS show very flat frequency and phase response (down to its low-frequency rolloff point). This demonstration gave me new appreciation for the challenges that loudspeaker designers face…and introduced me to a superlative new speaker design.
And if you want to design a loudspeaker, you need to know what it’s doing – accurately. Crysound showed a complete speaker driver testing setup, including an isolation chamber. You can’t do accurate measurements without a proper measurement microphone, and Crysound offers a wide range of these, along with associated equipment. The company even offers a drone-mounted acoustic imaging camera that can detect sound source distribution data and superimpose it on a video image! It’s used for applications like industrial noise and vibration testing, and gas leak detection. Crysound also has products to measure sound emitted from hearing aids, laptops, smartwatches…and even microphones.
Crysound displayed a complete loudspeaker driver testing rig at AES, complete with an acoustic measurement chamber.
Adam Audio showed their just-released D3V desktop monitor speakers, offering a heck of a lot of value at $299 per pair in black or white finish. They feature 3.5-inch aluminum woofers, dual passive radiators, and a 1.5-inch AMT tweeter. They looked really sharp, and have a frequency response which is so flat I did a double take when the company rep showed me the graph. I wasn’t able to hear them…every time I went by the booth it was packed with mostly younger people playing guitars, synthesizers and other instruments that were set up in the exhibit for demos.
Telegrapher is a new company from Istanbul, Turkey (they made their debut at NAMM 2024) offering powered studio monitors and a subwoofer with a variety of attractive matte finishes. The three handmade models and subwoofer are delightfully named the Gorilla, Fox, Elephant, and Gorilla S, (prices range from $5,499 to $11,499 per pair) and the enclosures are made from FCS (Forest Stewardship Council) accredited birch trees from the forests of the Eastern Black Sea Region. The circuitry is all-analog – no DSP. According to the company, their design goals were to “deliver warm, neutral, and realistic sound across the entire frequency spectrum. The Telegrapher engineering team spent thousands of hours refining its analog crossover and analog circuitry to ensure balanced sound, ample headroom, and minimal distortion.” That description certainly matches what I heard.
Adam Audio's D3V powered studio monitors garnered a lot of attention.
Telegrapher demonstrated their complete lineup of powered studio monitors and their powered subwoofer.
I find it an endless source of fascination that there are so many different varieties of loudspeakers on the market, all aiming for true high-fidelity reproduction. Reflector Audio USA showed their unique-looking SQT (Square Two) monitor, an approximately 12-inch cube with a central high-frequency driver flanked by four small woofers that are angled inward, all in a bass-reflex enclosure. Reflector states that this configuration offers a coherent blend between the drivers and makes them ideal for near- and mid-field listening. At the show, two SQT units where placed atop Reflector’s new SQT Bass active subwoofer with DSP and built-in 700-watt amplification. It works.
In fact, I feel like I’m going to start repeating myself in reaching for loudspeaker descriptors like “clean,” “detailed,” “powerful,” and so on, but the Reflector Audio system sounded like all that and more, with a sense of effortless dynamics, and I have to say that I didn’t hear a single speaker at AES that didn’t impress me. This hasn’t always been the case.
However, I wasn’t able to get a proper audition or even quick impression of some of the loudspeakers on display since the show floor was crowded at times, and the ambient noise high. Let’s just say that there were a wealth of speakers on display other than the ones I’ve mentioned, including models from Grimm Audio, PSI Audio, Augspurger, and others. Diversity in audio was evident in both the gear on exhibit and the makeup of the crowd from younger folks to the older audio legends – musicians, producers, mixing engineers and others – who were roaming the hallways and conducting seminars.
Immersive audio was huge at AES, from the impressive Genelec demo room featuring a full immersive audio setup, to numerous seminars on the subject (sadly, I didn’t budget enough time for any of them this time out) to a host of immersive audio software and mixing tools, like Audeze’s demo of Maxwell Head Tracking for the Dolby Atmos Renderer, which “knows” where your head is positioned while wearing headphones. Very cool! You can literally get very deep into the sound with software like Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratories APL Virtuoso v2, which can create the sound of a virtual binaural headphone listening environment with remarkable fine-tuning capabilities.
One of the most popular seminars at AES included a panel discussion with The Immediate Family, the group of storied L.A. session musicians formerly known as The Section who played on countless records by Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and many others. The seminar included clips from Immediate Family, a documentary about the musicians available on various streaming services.
The Immediate Family and friends: Denny Tedesco (producer of Immediate Family and The Wrecking Crew), musicians Waddy Wachtel and Danny Kortchmar, record producer Russ Titelman, musician Steve Postell, and record producer Niko Bolas.
And now for something completely different: the Demon Box ($699), a Kickstarter-funded product from newcomer Eternal Research. This triangular-shaped device, which looks like it would be right at home on an alien spaceship, turns electromagnetic frequencies into sound. As their description states, “it can make music from anything with EMF – from cell phones to tuning forks, drills to hair dryers.” 33 inductors capture EMF, convert it into sound, and route the audio through three channels, with various knobs to alter the output. It sounds…strange and otherworldly, a natural for science fiction movie soundtracks and experimental music artists.
DSP technology keeps advancing, as I witnessed over and over again at AES. The Fohnn Audio Americas exhibit gave an enlightening demonstration of beamforming in loudspeakers. Beamforming is the process of changing the output of multiple speakers using delay, volume differences or cancellation effect to control the behavior of an acoustic wave. It doesn’t really have an application in home audio since you need some distance from the speakers for the effect to “focus,” but it offers major advantages for live sound, public address, stadiums and other applications where sound intelligibility needs to be optimized.
Fohnn’s Fernando Vidal Wagner gave me a demo where he could aim the sound from a loudspeaker directly at me, or at another point in space just by entering parameters into the speaker’s DSP software. It worked exceptionally well from each of the company’s four beam steering models on display. It’s one thing to read about such a technology; it’s another to hear it in action.
Or not hear the tech, as was the case with the CEDAR Audio noise reduction system. Designed for applications like live broadcasting where the ambient noise can’t be avoided, CEDAR works in real time to eliminate the noise. The company’s Clive Osborn had me don a pair of headphones and hear a mic feed from the noisy AES show floor. He pushed a button on a CEDAR black box and the noise disappeared. Completely, while I could hear him talking over his mic.
Yet there will always be a place for old-school tech. Legions of electronics designers or guitar players will tell you that transformers are a critical element of the sound of an amplifier or preamp. (1960s Marshall amps are fabled for their use of certain “lay down” transformers, and the resale value of vintage Fender amps is drastically reduced if the transformers have been replaced.) The inner geek in me could not help but linger over the Triad Magnetics display, where dozens of transformers of all types were on display. Triad offers an almost dizzying array of them, and you can learn about them by clicking on the following link to get their e-book, “Transfomers in the Audio and Sound Industries.” I will be doing an interview with them to delve into the secret sauce of transformer engineering in a future issue.
Here's a wide variety of transformers from Triad Magnetics, as shown off by company president William Dull and Christine Dull.
I haven’t even touched on the cornucopia of all the other audio hardware and software on display at AES that help make today’s recordings and live sound happen, from mixing consoles to equalizers, compressors, mics of every conceivable variety, and much more. However, I have to single out a demo I heard at the Dangerous Music exhibit that proved to be another variety of audio education.
Their booth, which also featured Manley Labs electronics, Jam Racks studio furniture, Chameleon Labs preamps and processors, and Ex Machina studio monitor loudspeakers, had a rack of signal processing, mixing, and mastering equipment that made me once again realize that recorded sound is an art as much as a science. Audio Alchemist’s Marek Stycos played a song through the equipment rack, and by tweaking knobs and parameters, was able to bring the lead vocal forward or back in the mix, add depth and spaciousness, firm up the bottom end punch, and change the sound in subtle and not-subtle ways that made me realize that what you think is “real” on a recording is the sonic reality that the artist and producer want you to hear, an artistic artifice that represents their vision, not some sonic absolute that just happened to be captured on tape or bits.
This Dangerous Music gear provides extensive sound-tweaking capabilities.
The piece of processing equipment that fascinated me the most was the S&M (Sum and Minus) Chris Muth 20th Anniversary Limited Edition, a mid/side processing matrix that made the width of the stereo sound field wider or narrower to a controllable degree just by turning a knob. As Dangerous Music notes, this black box can do everything from altering vocal levels without remixing, fix overly wide or narrow stereo fields, enhance the width of anemic stereo synths, or set the stereo image of the mix without altering the tonal content.
The biggest takeaway you get after attending an AES convention is realizing that technology has the ability to empower music creators as never before. Most of us know that home and “prosumer” recording has exploded in the last generation, thanks to easy-to-use high-fidelity software like GarageBand, and a wealth of tools for home and live musicians. I always enjoy visiting the Hear Technologies booth, a company that offers equipment to improve live sound, recording, home studio and other environments.
One of my favorite products of theirs is the Hear Back PRO personal monitor system, which gives every musician the ability to tailor their own individual monitor mix. It connects over Ethernet and provides 16 knobs that can access up to 128 channels. Its new Pro Connect App even lets users customize the channel names for each knob display. Boy, do I wish I had one of these when I played places like the Country Corner and Down Under, where I could barely hear myself or anyone else in the band clearly.
A Hear Technologies Hear Back PRO personal monitoring system.
Although nowadays people can make incredible music with the touch of a button or click of a mouse, a few days after AES I attended a jazz concert at New York’s Birdland, and it made me realize that the magic of a live performance by a great artist is something that no technology will ever replace – but it sure can do an ever-more amazing job of capturing and reproducing it. The sound quality at Birdland was wonderful, enabling every musician to be heard with superb clarity and tonality.
Audio technology really has come a long way. AES 2024 reminded me of that again and again. If I could sum it up in one moment, it would be when I listened to the incredible young woman guitarist who was playing beautiful fingerpicked chord melodies in the Adam Audio booth, sounding gorgeous through their speakers. It once again confirmed my belief that future of audio and music is in good hands.
You should have seen this guy's hands move like lightning on this DiGiCo Quantum 225 mixing console.
It all starts with the microphone: Schoeps was one of the many mic companies at AES.
It wouldn't be an AES without the Telefunken Volkswagen van, purveyor of modern and exact vintage replica mics like the classic U47.
Focusrite offered the fourth generation of their renowned and highly popular Scarlett USB recording interfaces for home and project studios.
These Grimm Audio LS1 Series loudspeakers feature an interesting upward-firing servo-controlled subwoofer, along with built-in amplification and DSP processing.
Perfect for a Pink Floyd tribute band: Froggy's Fog offered a wide variety of fog and other effects, as well as bubble machines and even scent-distribution equipment.
