“This year’s European AES convention took place in vibrant Madrid, based on exemplary preparations by its Technical University, and it was enjoyably global thanks to a wide attendance from outside Europe. Especially from Canada, an audio superpower, I think ought to be awarded a convention somewhere in the future.

In our own sphere, reference listening was absolutely front and centre, with a dedicated The Ones room providing stereo, 5.1 and 3D listening of reference caliber. Genelec Technical Support Manager Anders Nyman is a true expert in popping up and running 7.1.4 immersive audio systems under non-ideal conditions and, with the help of our GLM calibration software plus listening, making them relevant – even for demanding professionals.

Genelec team: Anders Nyman, Feng Hanying, Joshua Shu, Anne Martikainen, Lars-Olof Janflod, Stefan Bock, Thomas Lund, Jussi Väisänen and Miguel Dominguez.

The room was used for talented student critique sessions, and I played host to official masterclasses with eight excellent audio recording artists: Morten Lindberg, Kimio Hamasaki, Stefan Bock, Richard King, Ulrike Schwarz, Jim Anderson, Florian Camerer and George Massenburg. In each one-hour session, packed with attendees, we discussed frequency domain and time domain neutrality in monitoring, intimacy and envelopment in the recordings, and provided unique and hi-res listening examples of each presenter’s works.

Right now, the reality is that the general public is mostly unable to experience what 3D audio really has to offer, which is because of compromises in the distribution formats. However, I would say that based on the smiling faces from attendees leaving our listening room, once that bottleneck is overcome, fine 3D productions will have a chance to spread further. They could also likely find greater use in therapeutics, outside music itself. The latter was discussed at a workshop between Kimio Hamasaki and I, while we also approached how standardised headphone listening might answer the ancient Inception Dilemma of audio, i.e. how much a listening room should support/distort content in various formats.”

If you’d like to learn more about Genelec immersive solutions, please visit
www.genelec.com/immersive-hub

Main image caption: Morten Lindberg masterclass, Thomas Lund showing pictures from recordings.

George Massenburg.

Kimio Hamasaki masterclass explaining Inception Dilemma.

Winner of the student competition: Anita Palimaka.

Florian Camerer and Thomas Lund in Florian's masterclass.

Stefan Bock masterclass explaing 3D recordings.

Richard King at the start of his masterclass.

Ulrike Schwarz in her masterclass.

Jim Anderson in his masterclass.

George Massenburg and listeners at his masterclass.