This standards meeting round was held as an online event. The working group meetings were held 12th - 16th May. The associated convention will then follow – 24th to 26th May at ATM Studios, Warsaw – details here.
The IABM has produced a report of the standards meetings that can be downloaded from this webpage (member login required). Below is a short Executive Summary of the meeting round. Unfortunately, I have to mention that the AES Standards work has suffered considerable disruption due to an updating of the AES website without support for the many Standards resources it used to provide. These services are slowly coming on line and hopefully suitable replacements will be in place by the time the Fall 2025 meeting round takes place.
A project is underway to standardize the transport of high quality audio on UWB networks to promote interoperability. The benefit of using UWB is high resolution and very low latency. An application area is wireless microphones in live performance because it has proved highly robust.
There are also a number of projects in the Audio Applications of Networks working group:
- Audio Metadata Transport (for AES67 streams). This project is no longer held up waiting for a SMPTE metadata transport document on which it is based (ST 2110-41, now published). The project chair announced at this meeting that he will call a telecon soon to check interest and hopefully resume the work.
- Open Control Architecture (OCA, AES70). This audio control and monitoring suite of standards has three core parts that are published. AES70 is becoming popular as a control protocol for audio applications but does not include video control, preventing it being a contender for our industry generally.
- A document on using AES70 for managing AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110-30 Media Stream Connections is about to go out for its second public Call-for-Comment period. Publication will follow. A NEW document is being developed by the group to add JSON protocol for AES70 (in addition to the existing Binary protocol).
- Another NEW document is underway for using AES70 to manage Audinate Dante (Reg) connections.
The AES Standards working groups that we attend are:
- Digital Input/Output Interfacing
- Audio-File Transfer and Exchange
- Audio Applications of Networks
- Digital Audio Measurement Techniques
- Digital Library & Archive Systems
- Metadata for Audio
- Audio Connectors
- Grounding and EMC Practices
