Audio Engineering Society European Convention in Warsaw, Poland, May 22-24

The Audio Engineering Society has published the full conference schedule for the 158th AES Convention, taking place in Warsaw, Poland, opening on Thursday, May 22, and running through Saturday, May 24. This is the second time that the AES European Convention will be in Warsaw. The selected venue for the event – modern film studios – should be an interesting choice. The conference will offer a wide array of topics, including music production, immersive and automotive audio.
 

The AES Warsaw event will build on last year’s successful AES European Convention in Madrid, where 170 world-leading audio practitioners, researchers, and technology specialists delivered presentations to nearly 400 attendees (including 102 students).

The 2025 AES European Convention will be held at the ATM Studio, one of the newest and most technologically advanced film studios in Poland, located in Warsaw’s Wawer district, in the south-eastern part of the city.

 

The conference will feature an extensive schedule of sessions and will be a unique opportunity for researchers and developers to showcase the newest in audio technologies, techniques, and research from around the world. The program will include the AES Student Recording Competition, open to AES Student Members, and the AES Student Project Expo, where students have been invited to showcase innovative technical projects and solutions through poster presentations and hardware demonstrations, emphasizing practical implementations rather than academic papers.

For the opening and special sessions, the AES has already confirmed Hyunkook Lee, Professor, Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL), University of Huddersfield, as keynote speaker, and Dr. Jürgen Herre (AudioLabs, and chair of the AES Technical Committee on Coding of Audio Signals) as the Convention’s Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecturer.

 

Hyunkook Lee is an Associate Professor in Music Technology and the Director of the Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) at the University of Huddersfield, UK. From 2006 to 2010, Dr. Lee was a Senior Research Engineer in audio R&D at LG Electronics, South Korea. He received a B.Mus. degree in music and sound recording (Tonmeister) from the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, in 2002, and his Ph.D. degree in sound recording and psychoacoustics from the Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR) at the same University in 2006. He is also the founder of Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratory (APL), a multidisciplinary team of psychoacoustics researchers, digital audio signal processing engineers, sound engineers and music producers, based at the University of Huddersfield, UK.
 

Dr. Jürgen Herre embarked on his professional journey as a young DSP engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany, in 1989. There, he was a member of the team researching perceptual audio codecs including MPEG Layer-3 (mp3) and MPEG-4 AAC. He studied Electrical Engineering at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and in 1995 obtained his PhD degree and joined Bell Laboratories for a PostDoc term working on MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding. Since 2000 he has been the chief scientist for audio and multimedia at Fraunhofer IIS, heading the development activities on MPEG Surround and other innovations. In September 2010 he joined Audio Laboratories Erlangen (AudioLabs). In 2021, Jürgen Herre, Karlheinz Brandenburg, and James D. Johnston were awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society Industrial Innovation Award, for their contributions to the standardization of audio coding technology. In his Heyser lecture he will share details of his 36-year research journey in audio coding and perception.

The AES Warsaw conference also offers a balanced program of signal processing, AI, Spatial Audio, and automotive audio sessions. Not so much in audio measurements and testing, and also lacking in transducers, which is strange given the abundance of research and innovation in these areas. Headphone oriented topics are also not a strong component, which is understandable given that the AES is promoting the International Conference on Headphone Technology in Finland, already at the end of August (27-29).

Highlights for the Warsaw conference include the Polish Audio Manufacturers session on Thursday May 22, with a behind-the-scenes look at the entrepreneurial spirit of companies such as Bettermaker Pro Audio, HUM Audio Devices, PSP Audioware, and others. 

On Thursday morning (9am) the conference kicks off with a session by Jonathan McClintock (Audio Codecs) detailing advances on UWB for High Quality and Low Latency Audio. UWB is progressing as an audio standard within the AES and the session details the options open to device manufacturers who are considering UWB for their next generation product roadmaps.

Right after, at 10am, Miguel Chavez (Analog Devices) will explain the benefits, tradeoffs, economics and tradeoffs of standard and proprietary digital audio networks in DSP systems. The session explores the key benefits of A2B, AoIP and older proprietary technologies currently adopted.

Already on Friday (9am), Jacob Hollebon and Marcos Simón (both from Audioscenic) will present their research on Binaural Audio Reproduction Using Loudspeaker Array Beamforming and progress in  the use of crosstalk cancellation technology, combined with listener tracking to ensures consistent and accurate binaural playback, even as the listener moves. This workshop will provide an in-depth look at the principles behind loudspeaker array beamforming, with a live demonstration of a listener-tracked soundbar.

Another standout session on Friday morning focuses on automotive audio and is titled “Investigating Individual, Loudness-Dependent Equalization Preferences in Different Driving Sound Conditions. The panel session will offer contributions from Jan Rennies, Andreas Volgenandt, Andreas Volgenandt, Sina Buchholz, Tobias Bruns, Christian Rollwage, and Jens-E. Appell, all from Fraunhofer IDMT.

Already on the last day, Saturday, at 9am, Christopher Struck will present a session detailing a new one-third-octave-band noise criteria (NC) rating method. At the same time that day, attendees will be able to participate in a Tutorial Workshop on The Gentle Art of Dithering, presented by Meridian Audio founders and audio encoding pioneers Bob Stuart and Peter Craven. As they explain, this session is for everyone working on the design or production of digital audio, and will include several interesting audio demonstrations.

 

In addition to the Warsaw convention, the Society is promoting the AES International Conference on Headphone Technology in Espoo, Finland, August 27-29; and the AES International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Audio in London, U.K., September 8-10.
www.aes.org

Complete information and registration for the 158th Audio Engineering Society Convention in Warsaw, Poland, is available online.

www.aeseurope.com