On Monday April 19^th, the Melbourne Section of the AES held a Zoom call for our regular bi-monthly meeting, with a good attendance of almost thirty members and visitors.

Chairman Graeme Huon introduced Dr Martin Koszolko to talk on the topic of remote music collaboration.

Meeting Report

On Monday 15^th February, the Melbourne Section of the AES held our regular bi-monthly meeting in the form of a Zoom Meeting. There was a strong attendance of more than 25 members and visitors.

Chair Graeme Huon introduced Charlie Van Dongen of Involve Audio to give us a presentation on his company’s work on modern surround audio encoding and decoding and speaker design.

Charlie started by recounting his early experiences with surround, starting with the Dynaco decoder, and the quad systems that followed in the ‘70s. He suggested that the reason for the formats’ failure in that era was the market confusion created by the number of competing systems. Moving to the present day, he commented that despite the current crop of surround systems, the predominant format is still stereo, given the number of portable and personal media playback devices. He cited a market survey by one 5.1 system vendor in the ‘90s that indicated that 60% of their systems were incorrectly set up to provide a stereo-only experience, with rear speakers either not connected or wrongly placed adjacent to the front speakers.