8th February 2000 - Student Industry Forum

The annual Students Industry Forum was opened by Francis Rumsey on Tuesday 8th February. As the students of today should represent the future of the audio industry, Francis started off with a bit of marketing. He portrayed the advantages of AES Membership and encouraged the students to form more AES student sections.

The panel of industry professionals were Richard Salter (Celtic Audio), Nick Wollage (Air Studios), Ken Blair (BMP), Rob Buckler (Strongroom Studios), Crispin Murray (Metropolis Studios), Steve Harris (Crystal/Cirrus Logic) and Francis Rumsey (Surrey University).

Members of the panel were asked to give a little information on their background, where they started and how they managed to get where they are now. Rob who now manages Strongroom followed a two year college course that helped him to network within the industry. One of his early starts was recording and mixing library music. He has worked his way up from a maintenance engineer to managing director of Strongroom. Steve Harris, now deeply involved in chip design, started in the industry with an electronics engineering degree. The thing that related him to audio that time was his final work for biomedical engineering: a pair of electrostatic headphones. Nick made the entry by means of the renowned Tonmeister degree and worked his way up from assistant, engineer, through freelance assistant to freelance engineer, and currently works at Air Studios.

The background stage was followed up by a description round where a few of the industry branches got explained in a bit more detail...to give the students a view of what they were looking at! It all came to the same one key word: COMMUNICATION. Whether you are an applications engineer in the silicon world visiting customers to find out their demands in order to get your chips to work to their full extent, or a mastering engineer who provides the magic stage to turn a pile of masters into an entity. Richard Salter valued technical knowledge together with an amount of musical or audio background. And then we got back to the essential communication area again where Ken Blair emphasised that you need a good 4 years of solid networking to set up a decent database of clients (employers) to earn a living. In the view of the panel, digital signal processing and surround sound are going to dominate the future. The synchronisation of video and audio is an issue of growing importance.

Interesting for some people, vinyl isn't dead. It still lives on in the club world. Analogue desks and recording devices are still extensively used...far from extinct! But, at the same time the computer environment is being more and more accepted. More record companies are getting interested in surround and DVD. So, surround mixing becomes a marketable skill there. Ken pointed out that the classical world is stagnating a bit at the moment. A lot of classical engineers got dumped by record companies and they continued doing freelance work for a variety of companies. As the amount of TV channels keeps increasing it certainly is wise to look into sound for TV. The same goes for the Internet!

Before the question time the panel once more put all the important things together. The ability to communicate in stress situations is of great importance. And assessing a certain situation and figuring out how to fix it will keep you one step ahead of the game. The importance of networking was emphasised once again and it was said that age isn't an issue in the recording game.

After all the public questions were answered everyone was invited for tea and biscuits and if there were certain things you did not want to ask in public you could go up to the person in question and have a face-to-face chat...networking!

Wesley Maebe