NAMM 2019: Insights From An Audio Engineer

The music industry is as diverse and global as any, but this week everyone associated with sound is fixated on NAMM 2019. Anaheim, California is playing host to this year’s conference, one of the world’s biggest gathering of music business professionals on the yearly calendar.

Audio is the name of the game at NAMM and there are hundreds of new products and innovations for everyone from the garage band singer to veteran sound engineers.
MarketScale’s resident audio expert Zac Brummett discussed what he was looking for from this year’s expo.

Of note was the abundance of prosumer technology. Brummett said it was important that the industry still makes quality equipment available for hobbyists and less experienced musicians and engineers.

Astro Spatial Audio is a brand to keep an eye on at NAMM, according to Brummett. The Dutch company has excelled with 3D immersive audio and object-based audio making for a much more encompassing experience for audiences in any environment.

Buzz Words To Know:

Psychoacoustics: the study of how humans perceive sound and it’s physiological effects

Wave Field Synthesis: a spatial audio rendering technique, deals with the  creation of virtual acoustic environments. It produces artificial wavefronts synthesized by a large number of individually driven loudspeakers

Audio Objects: an intelligent audio file.  encoding audio sources as objects with meta-data that describes the microphone’s placement in 3D space.

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