October 11, 2014 editorial: comments

Dispatch from AES

I’m writing this from Los Angeles, where the Audiofanzine team is covering the AES convention. For those unfamiliar, AES is an acronym for Audio Engineering Society, and the convention features speakers, panels and — the aspect we concentrate on — a trade show. It’s much smaller than Winter NAMM in size and is focused mainly on recording and live sound gear. Many fewer products are introduced at AES than at NAMM, but there are still lots of very cool items on display.

Unlike NAMM, AES doesn’t feature guitars, basses or acoustic instruments. You do see some synths, both of the software and hardware variety. Here at this incarnation of AES, the most impressive item in the synth department is not something new, rather it's a recreated version of Keith Emerson’s Moog modular synth rig, priced at a mere $150,000. Mostly you find outboard signal processors, microphones, and, this year in particular, DSP software that does some pretty amazing stuff. 

So far, I’ve seen products like the Sound Radix Drum Leveler, which lets you adjust levels of individual drums in a stereo drum track (should be great for drum loop editing), and Audionamix’s ADX Trax, an application that makes it possible to split out and edit a vocal track or melody instrument from a stereo mix, and then save separate files for the vocal, music track, and reverb. 

We’ve got a number of videos up already (including of the two products I just mentioned), and more will be going up tonight and in the next few days. So if you’re far from LA, no worries, you can experience AES highlights through Audiofanzine.

I’ve got to keep this short as the show for today is about to start.

Have a great week

Mike Levine 

U.S. Editor, Audiofanzine