23rd AES UK Conference
Music Everywhere: audio technology enhancing choice, access and quality
9-10 April 2008, New Hall, Cambridge
Wednesday 9th April 2008
09:45 to 17:30
09:45 Introduction
Keith Howard, Conference chair
10:00 Keynote address: What is happening to the global hi-fi industry?
John Bird, Understanding & Solutions
This opening presentation will set the scene by considering market trends including the rise of MP3, its impact on the home audio systems market, new trends including digital speakers and networked audio, and the market evolution and current status of home theatre.
11:00 Coffee and demonstrations
Four demonstrations will be operating throughout the conference, running in the Council Room, both halves of the Vivien Stewart Room and the Froud Room. The main demonstrations will consist of surround sound via headphones, DSP room correction, and a line array loudspeaker with controllable directivity. The fourth room will contain a number of smaller demonstrations, including DSP enhancement of small device sound quality. A selection of cars will also be available, parked in front, running demonstrations of production and research in-car entertainment systems.
11:30 Audio over IP - current status and future challenges
Greg Massey, APT
The history of transporting audio over telecommunications networks is chequered with questions over its reliability for broadcast applications. The introduction of IP-based codecs has raised the same questions. Manufacturers have overcome or exploited their characteristics to enable the use of IP-based codecs in the broadcast chain without sacrificing the features of older technologies.
12:00 Life after IP
John Grant, Nine Tiles Networks
Internet Protocol is currently the dominant networking technology, but it is less than ideal for the streamed media traffic for which it is increasingly used. This paper outlines the issues of which audio professionals should be aware when using IP, and describes a technology which fixes the problems for streamed media while keeping IP for the things it does well.
12:30 Standards-based audio networking for the home
Steven Harris, BridgeCo AG
Topics covered in this paper include: a home networking overview; network standards, wired and wireless; UPnP, PlaysForSure, DLNA; DRM schemes; audio servers; premium audio services direct from the internet; user interface challenges - how to find audio that you like; outlook for the future; and real products that you can buy today.
13:00 Lunch in the Dome and demonstrations
14:30 Design challenges for compact headphones
John Willett, Sennheiser
Compact headphones, particularly insert types, have become increasingly popular in recent years. This paper will consider the particular design challenges posed by these compact designs when attempting to achieve the highest possible sound quality.
15:00 Headphone surround monitoring for professional use
Mike Smyth, Smyth Research
Smyth SVS is an audio virtualisation algorithm for use with standard stereo headphones. As implemented in the Smyth Realiser, SVS could be readily used by professionals as a multichannel surround monitoring tool for recording, post-production and broadcasting. It also has immediate applications in consumer media players.
15:30 Tea and demonstrations
16:00 Signal processing methods for room equalization
Chris Kyriakakis, Audyssey Laboratories
The performance of audio systems is severely limited by the acoustical interaction of the loudspeakers with the playback environment. Room equalization methods can be effective in addressing such problems, but they must be able to combine measurements from multiple positions within the listening area and use both time-domain and frequency-domain information.
16:30 Line arrays with controllable directional characteristics. Part 1 - Theory
Laurie Fincham, THX
17:00 Line arrays with controllable directional characteristics. Part 2 - Practice
Jayant Datta, THX
19:00 Dinner in the Dome (demonstrations continue after dinner)
Thursday 10th April 2008
09:30 to 17:30
09:30 Digital Radio Mondiale: Bringing digits to the AM bands
Oliver Haffenden, BBC
Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) is a digital radio system for the long-, medium- and short-wave bands. This paper will explain how it was designed to meet the challenges of propagation in these bands. We will also present some of our recent work, including our involvement in a trial of DRM with BBC Radio Devon.
10:00 DAB - what is under the bonnet?
Simon Mason, Arqiva
This presentation will look first at national and local networks in the UK and what services they are currently delivering. The second section will look at services and applications that can be carried in the future. The final section will look at what part broadcast radio will play in our lives over the next 10 years.
10:30 Lighthouses, pilots and bitrates: riding the waves of internet radio
Nick Sharwood-Smith, Wave Science Technology
This paper will take a wide-ranging look at the state of radio on the internet and consider its possible future. This is placed in the context of broadcast radio development from Medium Wave and FM to DAB and IP.
11:00 Coffee and demonstrations
11:30 Market-driving trends in automotive audio
Tim Nind, Harman-Becker
OEM automotive audio has come a long way in the past 20 years. This presentation lifts the lid on some of the exciting work going on at a world leader in OEM branded audio systems. It discusses future trends and possible solutions for system architectures, processing, components and development tools.
12:00 Managing widening participation in music and music production
Robert Toulson, Anglia Ruskin University
Participation in music-related activities has soared since the development of internet distribution and the changing affordability of home music production systems. This paper investigates and evaluates the current landscape of audio engineering tools and music production methods to identify and map the skills deficiencies created by widening participation.
12:30 Lunch in the Dome and demonstrations
14:00 Keynote address: A presentation by Amir Majidimehr
Amir Majidimehr (previously corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group within the Mobile and Embedded Devices Division at Microsoft)
For this presentation we have asked Mr Majidimehr to look into audio's future, to envisage how we will buy music and video, how we will play it, how will we distribute it around the home, and how we will access it on mobile devices and in-car.
15:00 Music in the metaverse
Richard Elen, Radio Riel/Brideswell Associates
Second Life is the most popular 'metaverse', or virtual world, with several million inhabitants. Getting together 'in-world' to enjoy live music and DJ sessions in virtual clubs is an extremely popular activity. This paper discusses the music production and distribution chain in Second Life and how to maximise audio quality and effectiveness in this virtual environment.
15:30 Tea and demonstrations
16:00 Applications and challenges of processing audio over Bluetooth
Gary Spittle, CSR
Bluetooth-enabled devices that stream audio are increasingly popular. The expectation has advanced from the link being a simple cable replacement. A summary of the challenges faced using wireless audio connections over Bluetooth is presented, along with a description of algorithms to improve the audio at both ends of a link.
16:30 STm7200: a high definition multimedia system on-chip
Gael Lassure, STMicroelectronics
The STm7200 system-on-chip targets a wide range of multimedia applications. This paper describes the efficient and evolutive component-based Embedded Audio FirmWare architecture. It will show how the host processor distributes and balances the computation-intensive workload over up to four multimedia processors.
17:00 Tiny DSP: low power DSP core and tools for rapid algorithm development and tuning for 'device mastering'
Nathan Bentall, Oxford Digital
Market expectations of small size and low cost, and a requirement for very low power consumption, create difficult challenges in the electric and acoustic design of consumer devices including mobile phones, laptop computers and flat panel displays. 'Sound improvement' algorithms can improve the listening experience but high sensitivity to component cost can rule out many DSP devices.
Disclaimer: The organisers reserve the right to alter the programme without prior notice. Times are approximate. Titles may have been abbreviated in this document, and the outlines provided here may not correspond exactly to the actual papers or presentations.