On the Backstage of Eurovision Song Contest 2018

Imagine that you had to compose a 3-minute song that would represent your country in the largest song contest, televised live to 200 million viewers - the world's largest live music broadcast event. You have exactly 3 minutes to conquer the preferences of professional judges and each country's TV audience, knowing that a large number of people (and the majority in some countries) would vote simply based on their sympathy for neighbouring countries, cultural affinity, or artist recognition, given that no country can vote for its own song.

Object-Based Audio. You’ve heard the term. It means we no longer need to record audio information in 6 (5.1), 8 (7.1), or an insane number of audio channels – 22.2, as Japan is pitching for its 8K production and broadcast standard – to properly convey the spatial information of sound reproduction. And not necessarily only for sophisticated soundtracks in immersive formats. And that's where the industry is heading, leaving our precious "audiophile" discussions about the ideal "production standards" for stereo recording and reproduction of music in the dust.

It could be argued that the proliferation of smart speakers in the last 2 years has heralded the biggest evolution of music consumption we have seen since the launch of the iPod, iPhone or even CD. The BPI and ERA held an event in London on Tuesday 20th March 2018, that tackled the smart speaker impact on music consumption. Futuresource was proud to be on the bill, alongside several esteemed industry leaders and experts.

Munich-based Bragi is known for making truly wireless earphones, which are in fact the first truly smart hearables. Its first product, The Dash, won the CES 2015 Innovation Award Best of Innovation in the Headphones product category. When the idea of truly wireless stereo earbuds was still an idea, Bragi was working hard to enter the space, but their vision was going much further: truly wearables. As Nikolaj Hviid, Founder and CEO, Bragi GmbH puts it, "The purpose of wearables is to increase the data rate from the human to the machine."

A strange week we had, with most of the technology world focused on another edition of GSMA's Mobile World Congress (MWC), with the usual gush of new iPhone-clone announcements and most of the key semiconductor giants dividing their announcements with embedded world 2018, taking place at the same time in Nuremberg, Germany. Still, neither was much affected by the clash. MWC is more and more consumer electronics, autonomous cars, cloud solutions, and software developers pitching their latest ideas on social-engineered apps.

After reviewing my notes from CES 2018 and the announcements from NXP, I decided it was fitting to share some parts of my interview with Martyn Humphries, vice president and general manager Media IoT and i.MX Applications Processors at NXP (and former Freescale executive). Basically, we discussed the environment that lead NXP to create its i.MX 8M single-chip media application processors, currently the most advanced integrated platform available for audio manufacturers.

Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2018, the fifteenth edition of the world’s largest AV and systems integration show, was the largest business-to-business event for the professional audiovisual, electronic systems integration and related IT industries, with the largest exhibition area, the largest number of exhibiting companies (1288) and the largest international attendance, supplanting largely the two shows promoted by the two founding associations CEDIA and Avixa/InfoComm International.

What Happened at CES 2018? A lot, quite a lot. More than you think! With 170,000 or 270,000 visitors (depends how you count), CES must be one of the very few shows where the promoters actually try to play down the numbers regarding visitors, also because in practice, no one really knows. There are so many suites and hotels extending the activities of CES throughout the week, that it becomes hard to understand where it starts and where it ends.

In May 2016, following the Munich High End show, audioXpress published a short article preview of SB Acoustics' highly anticipated new drivers, including the brand's flagship TW29BN high-end beryllium dome tweeter, part of its Satori top performing range. The new drivers, also included new midrange and midwoofer drivers using new proprietary cones made with Egyptian papyrus fibers, available in 5" to 9.5" sizes. Thomas Perazella, an esteemed frequent contributor to audioXpress, had an idea for a new speaker project using those drivers!

Sad news for the audio industry. Gibson Brands announced that it is "ceasing active development and production of Cakewalk branded products." Gibson Brands acquired the Boston-based music production software company from Roland Corporation in 2013. Since then, Cakewalk has been consistently updating all products, under the leadership and vision of Craig Anderton. Cakewalk was one of the few remaining historical music software companies solely dedicated to the Windows platform.