JOURNAL FEATURES
A quick guide to recent selected AES Journal features
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Listener preference for one thing or another, be it reverberation, mix balance, loudspeaker arrangements or characteristics, has always been a thorny issue. It tends to depend who you ask, although common trends have been observed in a number of studies. There is some evidence that consumer preferences for basic aspects of sound quality (such as frequency response of loudspeakers or headphones) tend to follow professional ones, just with much more noise in the results.
The AES Virtual Vienna convention featured some interesting papers on perception and sound quality evaluation. In particular an emphasis could be found on listener preferences, clarity, and naturalness concepts in live and reproduced sound, such as with artificial reverberation and in sound mixes. There was also some revealing work on the effects of different loudspeaker placements. Some of the papers bear out the idea that if you gather a group of relatively untutored listeners together and ask them what they like, or whether they can hear the differences between things, the results will be inconclusive, or you will conclude that it doesn't matter. The more discerning and trained the listener is, the more likely it is that small differences will be noticed, and that these differences will matter for their preference. Whether the differences that highly trained listeners obsess about actually matter when it comes to implementing consumer systems may be a question overridden by practical constraints in the home, car or life situation. This is perhaps best exemplified by the reaction of one participant in a study involving multiple loudspeakers — "I wouldn't have that many loudspeakers in my house!"
Novel transducer technology remains a vibrant field of research and development in the audio community. Although we featured the topic in June, we did so again in the November issue because it was the subject of an important collection of papers presented at the AES Show 2020. Among the themes of the papers were all-silicon MEMS speakers, plasma speakers, flat-panel speakers, omni speakers, an energy based limiter, and a means of measuring timbre uniformity in different locations.
The MEMS loudspeaker design in question delivered surprisingly good results from a balanced radiator. "Omni" loudspeakers made up of multiple drivers on the surface of a sphere could be modelled in such a way as to understand their likely directivity response. It was found that limiting the overall energy stored in a loudspeaker system might prove more effective as a means of control than conventional voltage limiting. Finally it seems that there is clearly still considerable interest in research on flat panel loudspeakers, and there was some evidence that timbral uniformity across listening locations might be improved when using these.
As part of the AES Show Fall 2020, which was held entirely online, Kirk Harnack chaired a workshop on a topic close to many people's experience during the pandemic. "Broadcasting from Home" acknowledged that many radio operations had moved quickly from corporate studios into the home in order to stay on air. A sudden rush had then arisen to get suitable simple equipment that people broadcasting from home could use, including USB mic interfaces and audio codecs. Remote access was arranged to station automation systems, and remote audio connections were set up to enable live shows to continue to take place. The workshop "Broadcasting from Home" looked into the tools, connections, hardware, software and workflows that might outlive the pandemic, including what may have been learned from recent experience, the future of quality, and timely content creation.
As Harnack proposed, perhaps the industry had been ready for the Covid crisis but didn't know it until things had to change very quickly. Suitable equipment had all been readily available, but IT equipment and network systems had to be specifically checked out and configured to work well and securely at home. It is clear that good cooperation between engineering and IT teams worked remarkably well to keep radio on the air around the world during the pandemic. This happened in a way that to most people at home seemed almost undetectable and possibly inaudible. As with many things that have happened during the pandemic, the crisis has precipitated an acceleration of developments, leading to ways of working from which no complete "return to normality" seems likely.
