audioXpress August 2025. Focused on Acoustics, Simulation, and Auralization

The August 2025 issue offers a Market Update on New Dimensions in Acoustics, and expands the topic with articles by Daniel Gert Nielsen (Treble), Stefan Feistel and Wolfgang Ahnert (AFMG), and Neil Shaw (Menlo Scientific Acoustics). Richard Honeycutt’s column addresses the Acoustical Effects of Floor Finishes, and Dimitri Danyuk reviews Ethan Winer’s The Audio Circuits Cookbook. Philipp P. Klose reviews the Neumann Reference Immersive Monitoring Environment (RIME) solution, and René Christensen offers a Microacoustics Modeling Primer on Numerical Modeling.

Eclipse Audio continues to expand its partnerships and software, allowing the use of FIR filtering in DSP-driven loudspeakers, for loudspeaker design, live tuning, and system integration. The company founded by Michael John in 2016 now announced that its FIR Designer M (multichannel) software now has capabilities to build up to 6-way presets. Like the single channel FIR Designer, FIR Designer M now also added new branded IIR modes and expanded support with more DSP tools.

For the speaker builders, Perry Marshall details everything there is to know about his beautiful Live-Edge Dipoles project. A design that was inspired by two slabs of birch the author brought home, allowing to finally bring to fruition his idea to build these dipoles. Marshall reveals all the specifics of the driver choices, radiation pattern, and crossovers, while explaining the effects of the obtained radiation pattern and how the speakers behave in practice. This article was originally published in audioXpress, January 2021.

Eclipse Audio has announced a major update of its FIR Designer M software tool for creating custom loudspeaker processing (IIR+FIR) filters and complete multichannel presets. Version 4 adds auditionDSP, a dynamic new digital signal processor and audio player that enables users to listen to their custom processing during the development process, rather than relying solely on visual plots. auditionDSP also allows different filtering options to be audibly compared by running processing for up to three loudspeaker presets simultaneously, in real-time, with live switching between presets.