AES 123rd Convention Program October 5 – 8, 2007 Jacob Javits Convention Center, New York, NY Special Event Program: LIVE SOUND SYMPOSIUM: SURROUND LIVE V Delivering the Experience 8:15 am – Registration and Continental Breakfast Thursday, October 4, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm 9:00 am – Event Introduction – Frederick Ampel Broad Street Ballroom 9:10 am – Andrew Goldberg – K&H System Overview 41 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004 9:20 am –The Why and How of Surround – Kurt Graffy Arup Preconvention Special Event; additional fee applies 9:50 am – Coffee Break 10:00 am – Neural Audio Overview Chair: Frederick J. Ampel, Technology Visions, 10:10 am – TiMax Overview and Demonstration Overland Park, KS, USA 10:20 am – Fred Aldous – Fox Sports 10:55 am – Jim Hilson – Dolby Labs Panelists: Kurt Graffy 11:40 am – Mike Pappas – KUVO Radio Fred Aldous 12:25 pm – Lunch Randy Conrod Jim Hilson 1:00 pm – Tom Sahara – Turner Networks Michael Nunan 1:40 pm – Sports Video Group Panel – Ken Michael Pappas Kirschenbaumer Tom Sahara 2:45 pm – Afternoon Break beyerdynamic, Neural Audio, and others 3:00 pm – beyerdynamic – Headzone Overview Once again the extremely popular Surround Live event 3:10 pm – Mike Nunan – CTV Specialty Television, returns to AES’s 123rd Convention in New York City. Canada 4:00 pm – Q&A; Closing Remarks Created and Produced by Frederick Ampel of Technology Visions with major support from the Sports PLEASE NOTE: PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE Video Group, this marks the event’s fifth consecutive PRIOR TO THE EVENT. FINAL PROGRAM WILL workshop exclusively provided to the AES. DEPEND ON PRESENTER AVAILABILITY AND Using a specially calibrated Klein & Hummel Studio SCHEDULES. SPACE IS LIMITED TO THE FIRST 200 monitor system configured for expanded 5.1 playback, WHO REGISTER. along with a DigiCo console, acoustic matrix processing from TiMax, and professional DVD playback hardware, Standards Committee Meeting Thursday, October 4 Surround Live is a stunning audio experience for all who 1:30 pm Room 1E02 attend. Major sponsorship for the event is provided by Standards Committee Meeting SC-02-02 Digital Input/ The Sports Video Group, Sennheiser USA, beyerdynam- Output Interfacing. ic, Neural Audio, DigiCo, and Harris Corporation. This year the Sports Video Group will sponsor and pro- Session P1 Friday, October 5 vide a special panel of experts, including Ron Scalise of 9:00 am – 12:00 noon Room 1E07 ESPN, Bob Seidel and Bruce Goldfeder of CBS, and Jim Starzynski of NBC, for an in-depth discussion “Surround PERCEPTION, PART 1 Operational Issues—What Happens When It Leaves the Chair: William Martens, McGill University, Montreal, Truck?” moderated by Ken Kerschbaumer of Sports Quebec, Canada Video Group. The program is scheduled to include demonstrations 9:00 am and presentations from: • Kurt Graffy of ARUP Acoustics, San Francisco, CA, P1-1 Room Reflections Misunderstood?—Siegfried USA—Keynote Speaker Linkwitz, Linkwitz Lab, Corte Madera, CA, USA • Fred Aldous, Fox Sports In a domestic living space a 2-channel monopo- • Randy Conrod, Harris Corporation lar and a dipolar loudspeaker system are com- • Jim Hilson, Dolby Laboratories pared for perceived differences in their reproduc- • Michael Nunan, CTV Television tion of acoustic events. Both sound surprisingly • Michael Pappas KUVO Radio similar and that is further enhanced by extending • Tom Sahara Turner Networks dipole behavior to frequencies above 1.4 kHz. • beyerdynamic, Neural Audio, and others The increased bandwidth of reflections is signifi- ¯ Audio Engineering Society 123rd Convention Program, 2007 Fall 1 TECHNICAL PROGRAM cant for spatial impression. Measured steady- conducted. In the first experiment the localiza- state frequency response and measured reflec- tion precision of 22.2 reproduction was evaluat- tion patterns differ for the two systems, while per- ed. In a second experiment the localization ceived sound reproduction is nearly identical in precision in the horizontal plane as a function of terms of timbre, phantom image placement, and spatial sampling was studied. sound stage width. The perceived depth in the Convention Paper 7164 recording is greater for the dipole loudspeaker. Auditory pattern recognition and precedence ef- 10:30 am fects appear to explain these observations. Impli- cations upon the design of loudspeakers, room P1-4 Thresholds for Discriminating Upward from treatment, and room equalization are discussed. Downward Trajectories for Smooth Virtual Convention Paper 7162 Source Motion within a Sagittal Plane—David H. Benson, William L. Martens, Gary P. Scavone, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, 9:30 am Canada P1-2 Aspects of Reverberation Echo Density— In virtual auditory display, sound source motion Patty Huang, Jonathan Abel, Stanford is typically cued through dynamic variations in University, Stanford, CA, USA two types of localization cues: the inter-aural time delay (ITD) and binaural spectral cues. Echo density, and particularly its time evolution Generally, both types of cues contribute to the at the reverberation impulse response onset, is perception of sound source motion. For certain thought to be an important factor in the per- spatial trajectories, however, namely those lying ceived time domain texture of reverberation. In on the surfaces of cones of confusion, ITD cues this paper the psychoacoustics of reverberation are absent, and motion must be inferred solely echo density is explored using reverberation im- on the basis of spectral variation. This paper pulse responses synthesized via a Poisson tests the effectiveness of these spectral cues in process to have a variety of static and evolving eliciting motion percepts. A virtual sound source echo densities. In addition, a recently proposed was synthesized that traversed sections of a echo density measure called the normalized cone of confusion on a particular sagittal plane. echo density, or NED, is explored, and related The spatial extent of the source’s trajectory was via a simple expression to echo density specified systematically varied to probe directional dis- in echoes per second using echo patterns with crimination thresholds. static echo densities. A continuum of perceived Convention Paper 7165 time-domain texture was noted, from “sputtery” around 100 echoes per second to “smooth” 11:00 am above about 20,000 echoes per second, at which point it was perceptually identical to P1-5 Headphone Transparification: A Novel Gaussian noise. The character of the reverbera- Method for Investigating the Externalization tion impulse response onset was explored for of Binaural Sounds—Alastair Moore,1 Anthony various rates of echo density increase, and Tew,1 Rozenn Nicol2 ranged from “sputtery” for long mixing times to 1University of York, York, UK “instantly smooth” for short mixing times. 2France Telecom R&D, Lannion, France Convention Paper 7163 The only way to be certain that binaurally ren- dered sounds are properly externalized is to 10:00 am compare them to real sound sources in a discrim- P1-3 Localization in Spatial Audio—From Wave ination experiment. However, the presence of the Field Synthesis to 22.2—Judith Liebetrau,1 headphones required for the binaural rendering Thomas Sporer,1 Thomas Korn,1 Kristina interfere with the real sound source. A novel Kunze,2 Christoph Man,2 Daniel Marquard,2 technique is presented that uses small compen- Timo Matheja,2 Stephan Mauer,2 Thomas sating signals applied to the headphones at the Mayenfels,2 Robert Möller,2 Michael-Andreas same time as the real source is active, such that Schnabel,2 Benjamin Slobbe,2 Andreas the signals reaching the ears are the same as if Überschär2 the headphones were not present. 1Fraunhofer IDMT, Ilmenau, Germany Convention Paper 7166 2Technical University of Ilmenau, Ilmenau, Germany 11:30 am Spatial audio reproduction used to concentrate P1-6 On the Sound Color Properties of Wavefield on systems with a low number of loudspeakers Synthesis and Stereo—Helmut Wittek,1,2 arranged in the horizontal plane. Wave Field Francis Rumsey,2 Günther Theile3 Synthesis (WFS) and NHK's 22.2 two systems 1Schoeps Mikrofone GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany promise better localization and envelopment. 2University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK Comparisons of 22.2 with 5.1 concerning spatial 3Institut für Rundfunktechnik, Munich, Germany attributes on one hand, and evaluation of spatial properties of WFS on the other hand have been The sound color reproduction properties of published in the past, but different methods have wavefield synthesis are analyzed by listening been used. In this paper a listening test method tests and compared with that of stereophony. A is presented that is tailored on the evaluation of novel technique, "OPSI," designed to avoid spa- localization of 3-D audio formats at different lis- tial aliasing is presented and analyzed in theory tener positions. Two experiments have been and practice. Both stereophonic phantom 2 Audio Engineering Society 123rd Convention Program, 2007 Fall sources as well as OPSI sources were per- 1ATC Labs, Noida, India ceived to be less colored than was predicted by 2ATC Labs, Chatham, NJ, USA coloration predictors based on the spectral alter- 3University of Porto, Porto, Portugal ations of the ear signals. This leads to the hypothesis that a decoloration process exists for This paper introduces new ideas on wideband stereophonic reproduction as proposed in the stationary/nonstationary noise removal for audio “association model” of Theile. signals. Current noise reduction techniques have Convention Paper 7167 generally proven to be effective, yet these typi- cally exhibit certain undesirable characteristics. Session P2 Friday, October 5 Distortion and/or alteration of the audio charac- 9:00 am – 11:00 am Room 1E16 teristics of primary audio sound is a common problem. Also user intervention in identifying the noise profile is sometimes necessary. The pro- SIGNAL PROCESSING, PART 1 posed technique is centered on the classical Kalman filtering technique for noise removal but uses a novel architecture whereby advanced Chair: Duane Wise, Wholegrain Digital Systems, LLC, signal processing techniques are used to identify Boulder, CO, USA and preserve the richness of the audio spec- trum.