AES Student Blog

Meet David Josephson one of our honorable judges of the Student Design Competition at AES138 in Warsaw.

David Josephson studied electrical engineering at the University of  California, Berkeley, and joined the AES in 1979. After ten years working in geophysical instrumentation he founded Josephson Engineering, in Santa Cruz, California, now in its 27th year of design and manufacturing studio and stage microphones. He holds four patents with others pending. He is a member of the IEEE, the Acoustical Society of America and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. David has presented many papers, workshops and tutorials on microphones and related technologies at AES conventions and section meetings, and continues research in advanced microphone technology and sound perception. In 1996 he started and now chairs the AES Standards Committee working group on microphone characterization, and is chair of the AES Standards Committee on Acoustics. He started the AES Technical Committee on Microphones and Acoustics and now serves as its vice chair. He has served as Section member and vice chair, and as an AES Governor.

David’s standards work is an attempt to make it possible for the audio community to make informed comparisons among different brands and models of microphones, through the use of uniform performance measurements and data presentation. Some of the group’s work results in AES standards and information documents, such as the widely used AES42 standard for digital microphones. David has also been AES’s liaison with IEC on the maintenance of international standards on microphones, most recently resulting in a complete revision of the IEC microphone measurement and audio interface standards. It is a continuing effort, showing some progress over the years in developing a consensus among leading microphone manufacturers and users.