View of the audience with presenter Dimitris Stamatakos
After nearly 8 years of inactivity, the Greek AES Section held a meeting on October 3rd at the Piraeus University of Applied Sciences Conference Center, in parallel to the national conference "Acoustics 2016". The meeting was well-attended by more than 50 attendees, AES members and friends of the society.
The meeting was coordinated by John Mourjopoulos, Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Patras University and Vice-Chairman for the Greek AES Section. He briefly presented the mission of AES, the past of the local section which was first established in 1991, along with a number of proposals for the rejuvenation of the local section activities during the economic crisis affecting local audio professionals. During the discussion, a number of future steps were formulated to assist communication between members, expand contacts within local audio professionals and plan future meetings.
The technical section of the meeting was covered by Section Treasurer and audio journalist Dimitris Stamatakos (www.avmentor.gr) on: "Evaluation of D/A converters: standarized methods, laboratory measurements and practices".
The presented stressed the importance of properly assessing the performance of digital to analog conversion stages in consumer and professional audio equipment. He then outlined the basic targets of AES17 standard to evaluate the performance of such devices, along with the implementation of the standards by current laboratory software-based measurement systems. He also presented and analysed typical cases of device measurements drawn from his extensive test experience. The meeting was concluded with discussion on the perceived quality of D/A converters and its correlation to measured performance.
