L to R: Alan Hardiman, Earl McCluskie, Denis Tremblay, Artur Ayvazov, Dave Dusman, Ginn Anazawa, and Buck Moore — Toronto AES Section -- February 23, 2016.
Rob discussed the origin of the meeting focusing on the main point of getting people out of their workspace to share their passion with fellow engineers. Offering himself as an example he mentioned his participation as a presenter last year discussing the recording of Stuart Goodyear's Rachmaninoff concerto which, by the way, has been nominated for a Juno award.
Denis Tremblay was first. When not working at IMAX, one of his passion is guitars. He showed one he built himself. Not from a kit, he purchased the various pieces. The Telecaster type body blank was contoured and given a paint job without a polish simply because he liked the look without it. He also brought along a "Bernie" amp which was built around Bell & Howell film projector sound amplifiers. The tone control is a Baxandall bass and treble control on a single shaft making it actually a tilt control. Some of the mods were: removing the pentode input stage; adding a 'proper' spring reverb; and adding a tremolo. Everything was genuine 1958 technology. He had an assistant demonstrate the guitar/amp combo while Denis could discuss the various aspects more easily. There was a short Q&A afterward discussing filters and tubes.
Next, Buck Moore gave a presentation titled "The D-Curve — The Anchor Element and Fishing the Human Voice Out of a Mix". This is an EQ preset Mr. Moore developed for voice over the years (and after over 4000 shows) providing AV services for filmmakers and live events. He favours a voice/vocal first approach because he was not always satisfied with the vocal quality at live shows. The main aspect involves a 5 dB cut between 320 and 450 Hz with a not-too-wide bandwidth. It assumes the microphone is flat from 100 to 1k Hz. From there Mr. Moore will make adjustments adapting for the mic and venue. He demonstrated the curve with some playback samples: without the D-Curve, with the D-Curve, D-Curve with compression, and finally D-Curve with compression and make up gain. His goal is to make things cut through a little better by providing vocal clarity.
Earl McCluskie and Alan Hardiman described a multimedia application where source oriented reinforcement and sound design are combined with video projection mapping and lighting to create a dynamic 3-D immersive live concert experience for the audience. Earl gave an overview of the topic and talked about the effect he's trying to achieve, while Alan discussed the actual implementation using TiMax hardware and software that provides "the magic for the audio". Alan half-joked that on the day of the performance they'll be "skirting failure...but we're gonna come up with something!"
At this point there was a break in the meeting.
Artur Ayvazov discussed his company R2R Audio. They utilize a "different approach to research, development and design of acoustic systems". His presentation involved slides showing some of their products, and an overview of the research and philosophy of the company. Their two fundamental principles are: musical and vocal signals have nothing in common with a stationary sine wave signal; and impulse signals and a speaker's acoustic impulse response are the signals that should be used for measurements. One of their main products is a line of single, real, full-range loudspeakers.
Ginn Anazawa's presentation was titled "Electrical performance of headsets designed specifically for cellular phones and other portable devices". He discussed EMI and crosstalk, transducer types, shielding, headset cable arrangement and different design solutions. He also went over measurement procedures and showed typical test results for different designs.
Dave Dusman is a classical recording engineer from Buffalo and his talk was titled "Classical Guitar: A Recording Session in High Resolution". The guitarist was Marko Topchii, winner of the 2014 JoAnn Falletta International Guitar Concerto Competition. He discussed his mics and his reasons for using them, as well as interfaces, preamps and software. The close pair mics were AKG C414 XLII cardioid pattern, the main pair were Neumann KM130 and for the surround pair the AKG C414XLS omni pattern. The close pair were arranged in an ORTF configuration spaced a little wider than they would be normally, about 18-20 inches away from performer. Since he was recording at 192 kHz, he liked the 414's as they're electrically very quiet. Showing some spectral response graphs of the mics, he did note a lot of 'activity' suddenly in the 50kHz region. He played samples allowing us to hear the various mic pairs and make comparisons, and followed that with a simple down-mix version.
At the close of the meeting Rob DiVito gave a Toronto AES Certificate of Appreciation and AES coffee mug to the presenters. Rob thanked everyone again.
