Last year, at the AES Show in Los Angeles, sound reinforcement took center stage for the first time. Literally. A stage was set up in the Los Angeles Convention Center, and a wide array of manufacturers hung their gear from the rigging. We’ll likely see that again this year at the Javits Center in New York City, when the AES Show arrives there October 29 to November 1 with the Live Sound Expo intact and apparently bigger than before.
AES says its research indicates that live and installed sound engineers comprise some 25 percent of convention attendees. For them, the organization cobbled together a program last year that included topics like loudspeaker setup and configuration, miking fundamentals for the stage, networks and IT, the small venue monitor mix, installed sound and touring system optimization, with appearances by live-sound luminaries like Dave Rat, Robert Scovill and Dave Shadoan. Many of those rubrics and names return this year, as do live-sound sponsors like Clear-Com, DiGiCo, DPA, EAW, L-Acoustics, Optocore, Sennheiser, Waves Audio and Yamaha. In fact, this year, several key verticals in live sound will get their own days, such as Broadway Day (Friday, Oct. 30), devoted to live sound in the theatrical environment; House Of Worship Sound/Fixed Install Day (Saturday, Oct. 31), with a range of HOW and venue installation presentations including topics such as speech intelligibility and miking Grand choirs; and Tour Sound Day, on Sunday, Nov. 1, which will look at topics like networking speaker optimization on a large scale.
Live Has Leverage
All this says a lot about live sound, and readers of this space know it has often noted and chronicled how live music has become the new foundation for the entire music industry over the last decade and a half — in 2014, live music generated almost $30 billion in revenue, according to live-music service Songkick (which, I’m assuming, is counting tip jars, but hey…). But it also says something about the AES, an organization that has also found some surer footing in recent years.
Under current executive director Bob Moses, the AES conference program has improved dramatically, embracing sound reinforcement, something the organization had historically paid little more than lip service to over the decades, as well as personal recording, a cohort that has come to represent the vast base of the recorded music but one that the organization had had an unsettled relationship with until relatively recently.
Writing in 1999, industry gadfly Steve Oppenheimer, recalling the 1990 AES convention in Los Angeles, noted, “The personal-studio movement was still aborning, and it got little respect. MIDI was a dirty word in the pro community. The pre-ADAT Alesis displayed only semipro products, and Mackie Designs had not yet appeared at an AES show… Even for the established leaders [in home recording,], acceptance in the pro community came slowly.” Sixteen years ago, he was just beginning to sense a change in that sentiment. For an event that goes back nearly to the end of WWII, 16 years is not ancient history.
More recently, our own George Petersen wrote in these pages in 2012, “…from a sound reinforcement standpoint, the exhibition side of AES was… less impressive. The only live sound mixers on the show floor were from PreSonus and Soundcraft, along with entries from Studer, StageTec and Lawo — although the latter three all focused on showing broadcast-oriented products. Popular live sound console manufacturers such as Allen & Heath, Avid, , Cadac, Crest, DiGiCo, Harrison, Mackie, Peavey and Yamaha were all noticeably absent. The speaker side of things was even less represented, with the only live sound speakers on the floor being Community’s new VERIS 2 Series. There wasn’t a line array or floor wedge to be found anywhere at the show.”
Manufacturers have already taken a multi-pronged approach to creating product awareness, using private road shows and a bigger presence at shows like InfoComm, and the AES Show has only recently become a part of that for many of them. Rusty Waite, VP of Global Sales at EAW, told me that InfoComm has been the company’s go-to show for some time, and, he adds, “when launching new technologies, we’ve found that bringing the technology directly to FOH mixers [via private roadshows] has definitely helped with quicker adoption.” As live sound has increased its value in the market, Waite observes, “it’s only logical that AES make similar changes. This is the second year in a row that we are supporting their efforts and hope that others come on board as well.”
On The Verge
But what’s worth noting now isn’t the divergence of focus but rather the convergence of it. The integration between live sound and recorded sound has never been deeper, not even in the heyday of the live LP, when Running On Empty and Frampton Comes Alive could sit on the top of the Billboard album charts for months on end, when you needed an entire truck to multitrack a concert instead of an extra laptop or a JoeCo BlackBox. That’s a phenomenon that AES can and should leverage. The fact is, as so many major and mid-level concerts are now routinely recorded, and their mixes quickly (and often algorithmically) mastered and then streamed from artist websites and fan sites, the line between live and recorded music is blurring into a multimedia proposition.
It’s not unrealistic to suggest that in the not-too-distant future, the AES Show will reflect a music landscape in which much of the recorded music in the market was generated in some fashion in live environments. I’d point to the PreSonus StudioLive console as a hardware manifestation of this kind of future. Certainly, the adaptation of consoles to be able to use the same plug-in software that recording consoles have long used is another example of how this kind of synthesis of music production is already underway.
History shows us that the AES isn’t able to turn on a dime. The same can be said for most other trade associations, because these types of guilds are run by leaders who have come up through the ranks of their industries and crafts, and at some point their perspectives become fixed (and in extreme cases, calcified). Each generation has its own golden age that they’d prefer the future embrace, as well. It’s an understandable dynamic. But the music and music-production businesses are undergoing massive change at an unprecedented pace now. The future will be all about nimbleness. An ability to look over the horizon will be the key to keeping any organization in any industry in a leadership role.
To register for AES (including the free Exhibits-Plus badge, which includes exhibits and Live Sound Expo access), go to www.aes.org.
