NAMM Show 2025, Part 1: The Expo Has Become Pro Audio's Main Showcase Moving beyond its music roots, the show begins to address broadcast's complex needs By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Monday, January 20, 2025 - 2:22 pm
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Back in the BeforeTimes - the pre-COVID era - the NAMM Show displayed its professional-audio bona fides with a noticeable emphasis on DJ products. It was a major nexus of the National Association of Music Merchandisers' core constituency of musicians and their subset who had embraced the process of producing and engineering music instead of simply playing and performing it.
When it came to the top end of pro audio, the category's big iron, such as high-end recording and mixing consoles, was viewed as largely out of cost and operational reach for most of that cohort at NAMM's annual main show each January. Meanwhile, the big touring-sound systems - the same ones routinely deployed in professional sports stadiums and arenas - had migrated mostly to the annual Infocomm Show.
That changed in 2018 with the opening of the Anaheim Convention Center's new North Hall, largely dedicated to pro audio. This year, at NAMM Show 2025 Jan. 21-25, the North Hall will be filled with top-end, increasingly sophisticated, yet often remarkably accessible (financially and operationally) gear from companies that were once only aspirational for most musicians and music producers. Among them will be PA makers L-Acoustics and d&b audiotechnik; large-scale console and mixer manufacturers DiGiCo and Solid State Logic; mic makers Shure and Schoeps; and Audinate (Dante) and Waves software. In addition, attendees will be able to participate in official Dante training by Audinate with sessions Jan. 22-24.
Emblematic of that shift, making its NAMM Show debut will be console manufacturer Germany-based Lawo, which has a large presence in broadcast and a growing one in music production.
Those brands and others will, says NAMM 2025's promotion, help make this one of the biggest NAMM shows on record for audio.
The Big Show NAMM's John Mlynczak: We are making more demo space for our exhibitors and more opportunities for our members to hear what state-of-the-art truly sounds like.
One of the main reasons that audio professionals come to the NAMM Show is to hear the latest equipment from the biggest pro-audio brands, said NAMM President/CEO John Mlynczak in a press release. We are making that easier than ever before with more demo space for our exhibitors and more opportunities for our members to hear what state-of-the-art truly sounds like.
Says Dale Pro Audio Marketing Director Eric Eldredge, It's pretty much the only show that some of our brands do. The show is often a launch pad for new brands to establish their presence, he adds, pointing out that Voyage Audio will have its own booth this year. For several years now, NAMM's North Hall has been somewhat of a de facto AES California, so I'm curious how that will play out. Overall, the brand lineup looks very solid, and I'm eager to see what other announcements come up soon from our other vendors.
A Long, Strange Trip NAMM has been moving in this direction for more than a decade. In 2014, the TEC Awards shifted to the NAMM Show, leaving its longtime roost at the AES Show, professional audio's putative showcase. The TEC Awards, sponsored by the non-profit TEC Foundation for Excellence in Audio, were joined there four years later by the Parnelli Awards, which recognize achievements in live sound. With the completion of the convention center's North Hall, NAMM's takeover of the pro-audio expo action seemed nearly complete.
The AES Show, produced by the Audio Engineering Society, had been professional audio's primary exposition in the U.S. since the first one in 1949 in New York, which location alternated in the 1980s and '90s with Los Angeles and San Francisco. At its peak in the early aughts, the event attracted more than 15,000 visitors and new products from more than 350 exhibitors.
However, by the 2020s, the AES Show was less able to sustain a manufacturers event by itself, having begun in 2019 co-locating in New York at a satellite version of the much larger NAB Show. Registration numbers for the 2022 co-located show were reported as 7,000, with registration (AES did not report actual attendance numbers) reaching 10,000 by 2024.
Few industry pundits expect those numbers to significantly increase because the AES Show and NAB part ways this year. The pro-audio expo will be a standalone event at Southern California's Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center Oct. 21-24, its first time ever at that location and away from the national entertainment and media-production centers it had usually opted for.
The AES Show's diminution and the NAMM Show's ascendance - it had more than 62,000 attendees in 2024 - had left pro audio wandering a bit in the trade-show desert for several years. Some major manufacturers exhibited at only one or neither, as the pro-audio sector redefined itself and the expo business in general shouldered the effects of COVID. (Trade-show revenue overall witnessed a 68% drop in 2020.)
However, over the past 30-odd years, pro audio has transformed from a technically complex, expensive, hardware-intense vocation to a black-box, software/plugin-oriented DIY avocation. That transformation made it a good fit for NAMM's customer base, who were increasingly producing as well as performing their own music.
The 2024 NAM Show attracted more than 62,000 attendees to the Anaheim Convention Center.
Mlynczak declines to specifically address NAMM's position as an alternative or a successor to the AES Show as a primary expo for pro audio. But, in an email, he said, NAMM is in regular contact with e
