AES Show NY: Exhibitors See Broadcast and Sports Continue To Evolve

AES Show NY: Exhibitors See Broadcast and Sports Continue To Evolve Next year's AES Show will not be co-located with NAB NY By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Monday, October 21, 2024 - 7:00 am

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Updated 10/21/24

It was bit like an edit whose tracks don't quite line up. The exhibits floor at the AES Show New York opened on Tuesday, Oct. 8 but not until 1 p.m. (after a full day of education events on Monday), the exhibits floor at the contrapuntal NAB NY didn't open until Wednesday, and both show floors were open all day Thursday. It's a calendar affected by a variety of factors, including several religious holidays. In other words, it's New Yawk.

Nonetheless, both organizations packed a lot of people and content into the Javits Center on Manhattan's West Side. NAB NY's final tally was 12,000 attendees, with 250 exhibitors signed on (with a sizable number from sports sectors). The organization's program also kept sports tech in the mix with such sessions as From Studio to Stadiums, which explored how production techniques enhance fan experiences across multiple platforms and featured such speakers as Bill Ordower, EVP/chief legal officer, National Women's Soccer League, who talked about the growth of women's sports.

AES Show NY 2024 was co-located with NAB NY at Javits Center.

On Oct. 18, the AES announced that nearly 6,000 professionals, enthusiasts, and exhibitors from around the world registered to attend the 157th Audio Engineering Society Convention. The organization had projected attendance of over 10,000 audio professionals and enthusiasts. Those who did attend experienced a densely packed and diverse presentation and education program. And the co-located events were fully accessible by attendees from either side of the bifurcated convention hall.

It's Still a Business For an overview of what SVG audio sponsors had in store, take a look at the pre-show preview. Here is what some of their representatives had to say about how the audio elements around broadcast and live sports are evolving and what they're keeping an eye and an ear on.

At the Audio-Technica booth, where the BP3600 immersive microphone was on prominent display, Manager, Broadcast and Production Business Development, Gary Dixon noted that the larger broadcast business is in flux and explained what that can mean for broadcast budgets: Everybody's cutting budgets. But, at the same time, everybody keeps going back to sports, because it's continuously live content. It's evergreen is a good way to put it. It's compelling to watch. There are always personal stories behind it, and audio is a big part of that. I think comprehensive audio coverage of a sport makes it that much more dramatic to deliver to the [consumer]. I'm bullish on audio, naturally - we make microphones! - but I'm also confident about it, because sports wants more sound than ever now.

Mature Connectivity Audinate's Dante signal-transport format is a rare instance of a proprietary technology becoming a de facto industry standard; it's now an equal to such standards as MADI and AES67. That maturity has the format's parent focusing on infrastructure around it.

Dante achieved a lot of its goals in terms of becoming a very dominant format in the connectivity world, observed Joshua Rush, chief marketing officer, Audinate. I think one of the things that are really important now is not thinking just about networking protocols, just getting signals from point A to point B; the suite of tools and APIs around that make it easy for customers to use. That's why we've been investing so much in the software, the services, cloud connectivity, APIs, SDKs - everything to make the whole solution for end users more usable, because ultimately that makes their job easier. What saves them time and money is if the protocol is easy to use, integrates easily into their workflow, and integrates into the tools that they're already using.

Rush noted that Lawo, a major backer of the competing RAVENNA protocol, announced at September's IBC that it is integrating Dante into Lawo HOME apps software suite, bringing to eight the number of partners that have integrated Dante into the software versions of their mixing and control systems. It has been good for us, but it's also important that the audio industry continue to find ways to increase compatibility across platforms. It's cost-effective.

Virtual Virtue - and Not Virtualization was a constant theme at the shows. The heavy metal of audio products is moving further into ethereal iterations of software and cloud-based operations. That's becoming the case for comms, too.

That was top of mind for Rick Seegull, SVP, technology and business development, Riedel, which exhibited its newly launched Smart Audio & Mixing Engine (SAME) at its booth on the NAB side of the show floor. The solution is not aimed at infringing on the creative aspects of audio mixing (the specter of AI taking over that very human role loomed over a lot of conversations at the AES Show NY) but rather, he said, it's for managing the aspects [of mixing] that can be automated. If you just need to track a level, if you just need to add a delay for something that's going to go out over the radio broadcast, or if you just have two commentators in a booth and need to ride levels and make sure that their EQ stays consistent throughout, then you can take all these different jobs and monitor them from a single screen anywhere. That's the concept behind this product.

It represents, he said, a kind of specialization of virtualization, creating specific digital platforms, consisting of network plugins the company calls super tools, for specific tasks: for instance, preconfigured mixers for a s

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