Under new leadership, the AES could once again find itself at the vanguard of technology.
The annual AES Show has been a bit of a hard luck case in this century. It began with the September 11th attacks taking place just weeks before that year’s event, pushing it back by over a month and casting a pall over it, as the attacks did everything else. The show struggled as its core constituency, music recording, moved deeper into personal spaces, and online sharing and piracy ravaged record-label purchase orders. Then came the 2008 recession, which precipitated four years of declining attendance, with certain key exhibitors like Avid electing to sit out some shows, and others, like Sennheiser, abandoning it in favour of core events like NAB or the MI-oriented Winter NAMM Show, which had begun actively marketing itself as the pro-audio expo for the personal recordist.
The last time this column examined the AES, on the eve of its big US show in 2010, it was in the midst of hurled accusations of several varieties of malfeasance. Set that within the context of the preceding paragraph and it was an ugly picture indeed that emerged. At the time, I wrote:
The AES’s focus on the technical has the unintended but very palpable collateral effect of giving it something of an ivory tower perceptibility... At the same time, online discussions reveal a sense of disaffection that’s becoming ubiquitous, even among longtime AES affiliates, such as the technical manager at a major pro audio brand... who writes: “I can record, edit and master small projects for my local high-school bands on my laptop with a small console and a handful of mics. What does AES have to offer for people that do that kind of production work?”
Four Years On
Four years is a long time; some things have changed, some haven’t. First, one has to credit AES Executive Director Bob Moses who, since coming on board in 2012, has done much to give the organisation some of its relevance back. The addition of live-sound elements comes in the nick of time, as concert touring continues to be a reliable revenue generator. This year’s show saw new exhibitors in that department, including L-Acoustics and QSC. At the same time, the Infocomm Show has been courting that crew successfully for some time, as has PLASA, and both of those events have the kind of physical scale that lets a line array unfold in all its glory.
The AES Show has become more inclusive in the last few years, with more acknowledgement of the many forms that music production can take, and the fact that it’s become as much a lifestyle choice as a career option. The panels and presentation programmes have become considerably more diverse, buttressed by outside entities such as SPARS, with their in-person mentoring initiative; and this magazine, with Project Studio Expo. Both created separate ecosystems within the show that focussed on how music producers now fluidly traverse the boundaries between tracking room and living room. However, even as AES became more ecumenical, the world around it was doing the same, only faster and with cooler sneakers.
New Heroes
It’s possible that Moses’ presence at the AES helm is serendipitous for other reasons. For starters, his background has a decided IT tenor. His time as vice president and director of engineering at Wavefront Semiconductor, and as a programme manager at audio IC-maker THAT Corp, fits nicely with pro audio’s ongoing convergence with networking — a matter that was also well represented in the show’s panels. The same goes for streaming, which almost certainly is the next major plateau for recorded music and which presents a new set of challenges for sonic the quality of music.
In fact, AES has a significant opportunity to lead on the subject of audio quality, and Moses is trying to grab it. The organisation is interacting with other stakeholders in that issue, with joint initiatives with the Producers & Engineers Wing of The Recording Academy and the Digital Entertainment Group, all focused on improving the quality of digital sound.
For those looking in from the outside, AES is an unfamiliar entity. That’s a challenge but also an opportunity; one that can position those who produce music and those who operate its facility infrastructure as important cogs in the quality machine. Why shouldn’t producers or engineers for well-known artists be wheeled out as spokespeople for the quality of sound? Where could you possibly find more credibility on the subject of sonic quality than from that cohort? Car makers are putting their mechanical and design engineers into their commercials, and nerds are the new heroes of television and movies. It’s high time that the stars on our side of the console are used as the advocates of quality. AES can be a conduit for that.
Into The Future
This year’s show, in October, showed that the broader outreach is paying off, with increased attendance (over the last west coast show — the New York location is still the favourite) and a larger number of exhibitors. It remains a relatively small show, certainly when compared to NAB or Winter NAMM. However, there’s a bit of trade-show trompe l’oeil at work here: the days of battleship consoles, and having three or four 20-footers in an exhibition booth, are long over, and smaller booths make the show look more compact. In reality, just as there is more music floating around out there than ever before, so are there also more products to make it with, in the form of software, available to more people than ever before, professional and otherwise. That’s where AES is trying to find its footing — to provide a carefully curated forum for music production in an environment in which that endeavour has far fewer rules and far more challenging economics. Bob Moses is proving adept at leading his people through the desert of a radically changed pro audio and music business. Whether there’s a Promised Land at the end of the journey remains to be seen.