A New Integrated Systems Era in Barcelona

Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) is officially moving to Barcelona in 2021. The news was confirmed anticipating a scheduled formal press event to signal the agreement between Integrated Systems Events (the promoter of ISE), the Ajuntament de Barcelona (city council), the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and the Fira de Barcelona. The official presentation ceremony took place at the Barcelona historical Saló de Cent, or the Great Hall of the City Council, on July 19.

With InfoComm 2018 already behind us, it's time to look forward, when the very first edition of the Association of Loudspeaker Manufacturing & Acoustics International (ALMA International) Symposium & Expo (AISE 2019), will take place June 9 & 10, 2019, at the Double Tree by Hilton Universal, concurrent with InfoComm 2019, which will be held June 8-14, 2019, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Precisely because of that, we thought it would be fit to properly remember AISE 2018, the last edition which was held this year for the last time in Las Vegas, just before CES.

The Audio Engineering Society (AES) Milan 144th International Convention, May 23–26, 2018, was a small but well-attended event, extremely enjoyable for all those that participated. As always, a mix of audio industry professionals, students, educators, and top brands and audio service providers from around the world met "for the purpose of advancing the art and science of audio engineering."

The 2018 High End show promised to be the best one ever, in part because of the most pleasant weather conditions experienced in Munich - almost summer like - turning the Bavarian region into a tourist postcard and making any outing a true pleasure and the entire experience of beer and German food even more enjoyable, particularly in the fantastic nearby Englischer Garten esplanades and restaurants.

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.