Learning how to design speakers is not on most engineering curriculums in the US. There are a dozen universities and colleges teaching about becoming a recording engineer and many tech courses at vocational schools, but speaker design is another cup of tea. Back 30 years ago, Gene Petronius at Georgia Tech and Richard Small at the University of Sydney along with his mentor Albert Neville Thiele taught students about speaker design and there were a few speaker engineering courses scattered here and there at Penn State and elsewhere. There were also a number of events for speaker engineers to meet and learn about design practices, with Don Davis' Syn-Aud-Con having short courses on hot topics.

Also, back in the 1990s, on behalf of Ferrofluidics, Dupont, Teijin, and a few other clients, I facilitated The Loudspeaker University series. First held at Lowell University in Massachusetts, Richard Honeycutt wrote about the program in Voice Coil magazine. Following Loudspeaker U events took place in New Hampshire, California, and in London and Geneva, and eventually followed the audio business to Dongguan, China.

Back then the American Loudspeaker Manufacturers Association (ALMA) was just starting to evolve from a US special interest lobby to become the Association of Loudspeaker Manufacturing & Acoustics International (ALMA International), eventually evolving to today's Audio & Loudspeaker Technologies International (ALTI) Association. As reinforced in a recent article here in The Audio Voice, ALTI is a loudspeaker-centric association and is currently pursuing continuing professional education, promoting speaker building workshops, and college outreach on behalf of its Student Chapter.

COVID-19 permitting, ALTI intends to promote two events next year. The first one in Europe, held in conjunction with the High End show in Munich, May 18-21; and the second held shortly after, ALTI Expo, June 11–12, just before the InfoComm 2023 show in Orlando, FL. On behalf of its members, ALTI is also planning hospitality suites to promote business and foster the association's charter for the audio industry. These suites are ideal for companies that don't normally exhibit but need a meeting point and facilities to conduct their business. The first one is currently being planned for CES 2023, at the Venetian in Las Vegas, NV (positions are already limited - reach out to Barry Vogel now).

And there is the Audio Engineering Society (AES), which is an outstanding international organization but of course encompasses a wide view of audio and acoustics, with loudspeakers just one of many areas. Within the AES, there is the Audio Products Education Institute (APEI), which started out as the Product Development track at AES conventions. APEI has a range of pillars that provide guidance related to our work in key aspects, such as the supply chain, modeling and measurement, new trends in automotive audio, signal processing, and more. The next opportunity to follow APEI's activities will be during the 153rd AES New York 2022 Convention, taking place at the Jacob Javits Center, October 19–20 - a short two-day event.

Exploring some pressing topics in headphone technology, in this article Hans W. Gierlich addresses active noise cancellation headset testing. This Practical Test & Measurement article addresses requirements for effective performance testing of communication headsets that use active noise cancellation (ANC) technologies, test setups, testing equipment, and setup conditions needed to correctly assess ANC performance. From the right choice of artificial ears and the latest ITU-T recommendations in that domain, to ANC performance measurements with passive and active insertion loss, talk-though performance, and perceptual evaluation of sound quality. This article was originally published in audioXpress, June 2022. Read the Full Article Now Available Here

In this Voice Coil Test Bench, Vance Dickason characterizes the AMT 23CM1.1-C Air Motion Transformer from Mundorf. This high-end AMT is the second model from the series recently launched by this established supplier of crossover components to hi-fi and high-end loudspeaker manufacturers. Following the explication of the U80W Mundorf AMT, published in the March 2022 issue of Voice Coil, Dickason dives deeper into the series and proprietary diaphragm material used in all the Mundorf AMTs. Features for the Mundorf AMT 23CM1.1-C include a 130mm × 53mm pleated AMT diaphragm, an optimized injection-molded rear chamber, a flat round metal face plate, 90dB sensitivity, and 125W power handling with a minimum second-order 2.2kHz high-pass network. This article was originally published in Voice Coil, April 2022.  Read the Full Article Now Available Here