AES Standards News Blog

The New York AES Convention in October 2020 has been converted to a virtual format as a consequence of the COVID19 pandemic. Therefore the concurrent AES Standards meetings will be online as well. 

Since physical attendance is not required, the Standards meetings will not be held on the same dates as the technical sessions.  Standards meetings will be held before the technical sessions, to reduce schedule conflicts for attendees. 

Since attendees will no longer all be in the same time zone, as happens with physical meetings, the meeting schedule will be different. Meetings will occur over 5 days beginning October 5 with the Plenary session on Saturday October 10.  Meetings have been limited to 3 hours in any single day to allow meeting times which span the widest number of waking time zones.  

Since all active Task Groups hold regular online meetings, usually biweekly, they will not hold special meetings associated with the online convention.  

More Information

The AES has just published a request for comments on an AES74 Conformance Questionnaire.

This questionnaire will be the instrument of an upcoming AES survey of network media directory schemes.  The survey will assess the conformance of each scheme with AES74, the recently-published standard requirements specification for media network directories and related services. 

The survey will not evaluate, review, or compare directory schemes or their implementations.  It will simply report on the AES74 conformance of each.

The survey will be done collaboratively with the proponents of the various schemes surveyed.

The survey's conclusions will be published in an AES report that will be of interest to network media equipment manufacturers, to media system designers, and to media company technical architects and strategists.

The survey aims to be inclusive:  If you make, use, or know of a directory scheme that should be included, please inform the AES via email to [email protected]. 

Comments are invited from anyone.  Comments received will be incorporated into the final copy of the questionnaire.  Instructions for submitting comments are in the download page.

The closing date for comment submission is  September 30, 2020. 

More Information and to download a copy

The AES Standards Committee is starting a project to update terminology in AES Standards which may be culturally insensitive.  Use of the terms "master" and "slave" are specifically being examined, but others may be as well.  This is a general issue for all products, systems, architectures, and standards that have used those terms heretofore.

To avoid confusion it is also important that replacement terms be consistent with similar efforts being undertaken in the IEEE and SMPTE.  The AESSC has a strong liaison relationship with SMPTE and is looking to form one with the IEEE specifically to assist with this effort.

The committee hopes that in due course it can arrive at a uniform replacement that will work gracefully for the majority of cases, to avoid both opposing extremes:

1. having to develop case-specific solutions for each affected standard;

2. having generic but impossibly awkward terms.

The committee welcomes input on this topic.  Please address all comments and submissions to the Standards Manager.

Several reports of the May AES Standards Working Group meetings are now online.  

SC-02-01 on Digital Audio Measurement
SC-02-02 on Digital Audio input/output interfacing
SC-03-12 on Forensics
SC-04-04 on Microphone Measurement and Characterization
SC-04-08 on Measurement and Equalization of Sound Systems in Rooms
SC-04-09 on Assessment of Acoustic Annoyance

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The AES Standards Sustainer program is a way for companies to financially support the AES Standards Committee activities. Unlike other technical societies with standards programs, the AES does not charge participation fees. The Society believes that a completely open process ultimately produces better and more widely accepted standards. Consequently we depend on other sources of revenue.

In the past year, Standards Sustainer's generous contributions helped fund ongoing Standards activities and our liaison relationships with other societies.  It also allowed the AES to launch new standards development projects, including new projects in networked audio, loudspeaker measurement, and the restarting of our standardization efforts in forensic audio.  We could not have accomplished these things without that support.

Besides enabling the development of standards that underlie fundamental technology in the audio industry, the program offers significant exposure and valuable marketing / public relations avenues.

Renewal invoices went out to existing Standards Sustainers earlier this month.  Other interested parties are encouraged to become Standards Sustainers as well.

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The AES SC-03-06 Working Group on Archiving and Restoration is restarting. Nadja Wallaszkovits and Brad McCoy have agreed to be Chair and Vice Chair. 

The Working Group addresses the application of digital technologies for media preservation and access. Among the topics covered are strategies for content conversion and migration, content integrity, methods of access and distribution, storage systems and media, formats for preservation and distribution, and metadata and documentation. The working group will take account of the work of other organizations in this and related fields, and will liaise and work in conjunction with them.

Individuals interested in participating in group meetings should contact the Standards Manager at [email protected]. 

The AES SC-03-12 Working Group on Forensic Audio met online after a multi-year hiatus.  Attended by 22 people, the group reviewed progress on project AES-X253.  The project is to develop speech collection guidelines for speaker recognition, specifically audio collection at a temporary location.  The group reviewed the first draft of the working document. 

John Hansen is the interim chair.  The group is soliciting permanent Chair and Vice Chair candidates.   People interested in serving on the working group or who want to serve as Chair or Vice Chair should contact the Standards Manager at [email protected].

More Information

In a first for the AES, the spring Standards meetings were held entirely online May 26 – 29. Meetings have been accesible online during previous conventions, but this is the first time there has not been an in-person component Twelve working groups met over the 4 days.  Meeting length ranged from 30 to 90 minutes and attendance varied from 7 to 25 people.  The meetings were followed by a Plenary meeting at which the chairs of each working group summarized the activity within their group. 

Meeting reports will be posted on the AES Standards web site as they become available.

Meetings reports available here

The Vienna AES Convention in May 2020 has been converted to a virtual format as a consequence of the COVID19 pandemic. Consequently the concurrent AES Standards meetings will be changing to an online format. 

Since physical attendance is no longer required, the Standards meetings will not be held on the same dates as the online convention. The convention has been delayed, and will now run June 2 - 5, 2020.  Standards meetings will be held the week before the AES convention, to reduce schedule conflicts for attendees. 

Since attendees will no longer all be in the same time zone, as happens with physical meetings, the meeting schedule will be different. Meetings have been limited to 4 hours in any single day to allow meeting times which span the widest number of waking time zones.  Since all active Task Groups hold regular online meetings, usually biweekly, they will not hold special meetings associated with the online convention.  

Meeting schedule and agendas

AES60id-2020, "AES Information Document for audio metadata - Core audio metadata" was published 0n 2020-04-15.

This specification addresses the creation, management and preservation of material that can be re-used as originally produced, or may provide input material for new production projects. Material is expected to be exchanged between various organisations or between production facilities in a distributed environment. 

The core set of metadata presented in this specification is a co-publication of EBU Tech3293-2019 EBUCore, itself an extension to and a refinement of the Dublin Core. EBUCore is a minimum list of attributes characterizing video and / or audio media resources. An XML representation is used as this is the likely method that metadata would be implemented, for example in archive exchange projects using the Open Archive Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

For a preview and to purchase this document: