Ask A Sound Guy

Following the heels of Musikmesse that was held in the first week of April, AES Europe will be coming to Munich, Germany from May 7-10 this year. With the convention coming up quickly, I thought it’d be nice to highlight some of the big news that’ll be coming out of the convention.

• Schoeps will be revealing a new surely super-expensive microphone capsule called the MK 22. It will be added to their recent line of Colette of modular microphone and is touting a new “Open Cardioid” pattern. In short, it combines the directionality of the MK 4 with the sonice characteristics of the MK 21. It’s being marketed as a premier solution for a soloist microphone.
• Neutrik will be showing off some new counter-piracy holographic technology that’s apparently added to the mix in the production process. I’m sure this is huge news for hardware manufacturers, but I think most of us could really care less.
• MUTEC will be unveiling a few different things at this convention: 1) MC-4, a high performance digital audio multichannel format converter for ADATTM, AES3 and S/PDIF and can SRC up to 16 channels, 2) MC-8, based on the same technology as the MC-4 but will do 8 channels of SRC and only works with AES3, 3) MC-6 is the same as the MC-4 and 8, works with AES3, S/PDIF, and AES3id, but only works with stereo signals. They will also be debuting the MC-7 which is a new 8 channel Word Clock distro amp.
• Digital Audio Services, a top German audio/video retailer and instillation company, will be letting you turn knobs at their booth with a selection of audio and video control surfaces from Euphonix with in-depth demos in both German and English. They will also have top-quality gear from the likes of Brent Averill and A-Designs.
  
• The R&D Team will be talking about loudspeaker anaylization devices that, frankly, I don’t understand. But maybe you do, so check them out.
• DSLab will be showing off their newest loudspeaker, the Dolomon Saga. It’s apparently got a granite design (the box?) and, as the clearly translated-from-German-to-English press release tells me, “combining elegant granite design with exceptional live dynamics sound pleasure.” I love exceptional live dynamics sound pleasure.

So far that’s all I’ve really heard about the conference, but I bet you I’ll hear a little more before the show starts.

AES is always a blast. So if you’re in Europe, I’d recommend buying a pass and checking this out.