Pre Con

The 143rd Audio Engineering Society International Convention

For the first time, AES will be co-located with the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show 2017, creating a one-stop shop for attendees to learn more about the audio and visual fields.

Overview

Approximately 18,000 Audio Engineering Society (AES) members, audio professionals, students, educators, and tech-savvy hobbyists will attend the four-day AES New York 2017 for workshops, tutorials, sound demonstrations, and sessions in tracks such as “Audio for Cinema,” “Game & VR Audio,” “Broadcast & Media Streaming,” and “Spatial Audio.”

CHALLENGES For the first time, AES will be co-located with the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show 2017, creating a one-stop shop for attendees to learn more about the audio and visual fields. “We sat down with NAB and said, ‘Oh, so you’re looking at that time at the Javits? Well, we are, too,’” said Frank Wells, AES’s director of communications. “The result of those conversations is we’re collaborating to a certain degree. We will have two independent trade shows in the Javits Center at the same time in adjacent halls.” This might sound like it could be a planner’s worst nightmare, but Wells prefers to call it “an opportunity of logistics.” Of AES’s roughly 300 exhibitors, Wells estimates that only 14 will overlap between the two shows.

INITIATIVES Because audio engineers try to stay in tune with emerging technologies, AES extensively updates its conference programming every year. “There’s been a lot on augmented and virtual reality,” Wells said. “There’s a lot of events around the country on those topics, but audio has never been the specialty of any of those events before.”

Last year, AES held a separate, three-day event on those subjects, and is piggybacking on attendees’ interest in it at this year’s show.

Casey Gale

Casey Gale is associate editor of Convene.