Meeting Report

On Monday 15^th February, the Melbourne Section of the AES held our regular bi-monthly meeting in the form of a Zoom Meeting. There was a strong attendance of more than 25 members and visitors.

Chair Graeme Huon introduced Charlie Van Dongen of Involve Audio to give us a presentation on his company’s work on modern surround audio encoding and decoding and speaker design.

Charlie started by recounting his early experiences with surround, starting with the Dynaco decoder, and the quad systems that followed in the ‘70s. He suggested that the reason for the formats’ failure in that era was the market confusion created by the number of competing systems. Moving to the present day, he commented that despite the current crop of surround systems, the predominant format is still stereo, given the number of portable and personal media playback devices. He cited a market survey by one 5.1 system vendor in the ‘90s that indicated that 60% of their systems were incorrectly set up to provide a stereo-only experience, with rear speakers either not connected or wrongly placed adjacent to the front speakers.

On Monday November 9^th, the Melbourne Section of the AES held a Zoom call for our regular bi-monthly meeting, with a strong attendance of more than twenty members and visitors.

Vice-Chair Paolo Menolotto introduced Fabio Marraccini to talk on the topic of online music jamming and rehearsals.

Fabio started his presentation with an explanation of the difference between online jams – where playing together using low latency connections is emphasised for spontaneity – and remote collaboration – where the recording quality and synchronization are paramount, so it’s often individuals playing alone to a reference or click-track.