JOURNAL FEATURES
A quick guide to recent selected AES Journal features
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The challenge of how best to archive recordings of the past, even the recent past, never seems to diminish. Indeed, with so much material being generated for digital media consumption these days, and the seemingly ephemeral nature of some of it, it can be very hard to make decisions about what to preserve and how. Anyone who has run recording projects will know the difficulties of deciding about whether to keep all the source material, edit lists, video clips, multitracks, and so forth, or whether simply to preserve the final master. In an ideal world one would keep everything, but then how do you remember where it is in 20 years time, particularly if you have consigned it to some cloud resource, and will it still be there?
During the 147th Convention, Jessica Thompson chaired a track on archiving and restoration that included workshops on a number of important aspects of these challenges. Selected highlights are summarized here, including parts of the opening workshop on long-term preservation of audio assets, and two later ones dealing with multitracks and tape-based digital formats from the 90s.
Immersive audio technology is gaining popularity, but what is meant by “immersion” and what are the perceived differences when sound is reproduced from lots of different directions, or using novel forms of rendering? Can the results be appreciated on mobile technology or soundbars, and is there any advantage for music reproduction? These and other questions about immersive audio evaluation were addressed by authors at the 147th AES Convention.
When it comes to evaluating advanced spatial audio or immersive audio technology there may be advantages to adopting some form of reference-free evaluation. There’s also the question of defining immersion carefully enough, and a comprehensive attempt at doing this in the audio context has been undertaken. We find that non-experienced listeners may not have the same preference patterns as experienced ones in this context, and that additional low-slung loudspeakers can improve the results in certain cases. Finally, soundbar-like technology doesn’t seem to outpace discrete surround sound but it does seem to offer some advantages over two-channel stereo when reproducing multichannel content.
