The next meeting of the AES Melbourne Section is on Monday 13th October at 7:30pm at:
The School of Audio Engineering (SAE) Lecture Theatre, 235 Normanby Rd South Melbourne (directions below).
Rod Staples will present on the topic:
What’s all this Digital Stuff about anyway?
In a world that demands best use of byte budgets between word length, sample rate and channel counts, it is a good idea to get the latest update.
As the introductory Melbourne AES session on digital audio themes, Dr Rod Staples will outline everything you wanted to know but have not yet had time to ask.
Rod will take us through history to show the significant events that led from pre-history to the digital world we live in today. He’ll start with Babylonian observations of astronomical events, and their coding of the data in cuneiform on tablets for later analysis. It progresses through the interpolation of these discrete observations into continuous mathematical functions by the likes of Newton, Fourier and Laplace.
Then Rod will move to the development of telegraphy, telephony, and computers from electro-mechanical through to digital systems using solid state devices. From that historical base, he will consider how the encoding of analogue signals evolved from making telephony trunk systems more efficient in the 1950s to the ubiquitous digital world of today where we seamlessly access text, audio, pictures and movies in a wide variety of media and devices, and most people enjoy “on-line” access to information, business and entertainment.
Details:
Monday 13th October 2014 at 7:30pm
-at-
The School of Audio Engineering (SAE) – Lecture Theatre
235 Normanby Road
South Melbourne
Visitors and guests welcome.
Directions: Entry to SAE is via the Students’ Entry, off the carpark. Please report to the Supervisor’s Desk at this entry, and you will be directed to the Lecture Theatre (through to the back of the building, upstairs via the steel staircase).
About Rod Staples:
After a period as a conscript in the Army, serving as an electronics Technician, working with HF and MW transmitters in a network sending voice and telegraph traffic around the world, Dr Staples joined the Defence Department as a civilian.
Here he worked with machine telegraphy, analogue telephony, and a wide variety of radio, audio and video equipment.
Then after a short career as a Computer Field Service Engineer working with 16 bit minicomputers, Dr Staples began a teaching career in 1976 that would last until 2011.
At first he taught general subjects in electronics while completing his professional Diploma in Communication Engineering at RMIT, and then obtaining a Graduate Diploma of Education from the State College of Education at Hawthorn. A sustained interest in Broadcast engineering led Dr Staples to create a technical specialist short course in audio technology, and in response to demand, a specialist Audio Production course which was an early user of ProTools 1.
He taught many subjects in electronics technical and production courses, including subjects in communications theory and practice, electronic measurement, telecommunications, computers, networking and the Internet, television and audio production, planning and management, and statistics.
His interest in Technology Based Teaching and Learning led to a Masters Degree in Education in 1989 from Melbourne University, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from RMIT in 2001.
It relates to a high level of international involvement in radio telecommunications, and to the direct implementation of technology-based teaching to accelerate course delivery in Australia. It was a very early application of the internet, and the local course used video and audio supplementation as well.
Dr Staples is a Member of the AES, a life member of the SMPTE, and a retired Chartered Professional Engineer.
We hope to see you there.