If you have never been to an Audio Engineering Society convention, here's the picture.

      As you wander around a large area (figure an eighth of a mile square) you see hundreds of products on display for application ranging from duplication to keeping your cables neat to designing your own gear using IC's from various builders. There are products for broadcast, live sound reinforcement, large-format multi-room facilities and DIY recorders. Some of the gadgets are not application-specific and there's a lot of crossover between all of the above.

      There's a wide demographic represented on the floor: students looking for their first gig, seasoned artists looking for something to flesh out their home recording rig, audio designer nerds of every age, and the well-known recording engineers who, for three days, are the rock stars of the convention floor. Every so often an aisle is blocked and it's hard to get through because there's a sighting of Geoff Emerick, Eliot Scheiner, Bob Clearmountain or Bob Ludwig. Otherwise, it's just a mad crush of people thinking about spending money on more toys or finding out if their existing toys are obsolete … or maybe hoping that the gear will finally do what it was original supposed to do in the next revision. There are also workshops and technical presentations on every topic imaginable, from audio for high-definition video to microphone technique.

      It’s a good place to get a sense of the state of the technical side of the audio industry, which often follows the trends in the music business. My take on things this year: It’s small but energized and viable. After years of consolidation of labels, declining album sales and pressure from the DAW/DIY crowd, the size of the audio community seems to have stabilized, and there was a lot of positive energy and optimism on the floor, at least from those still in the business. There are fewer audio-specific companies than 10 years ago, but those that still stand are full of innovation and technology magic.

      Here are a few standout products from the floor, in no particular order of importance.

      A new plug-in manufacturer, Isotope (www.izotope.com), is developing a name for high-quality plug-ins at a reasonable price that will work with any workstation. They showed a full complement of plugs that were everything from high fidelity to highly colorful.

      SSL, the behemoth console manufacturer, showed a new console that combines a control surface to run a DAW (www.solid-state-logic.com/music/duality.html) digital signal processing to use it as a digital mixing console and a multi-channel audio front end for a DAW with mic preamps and analog signal processing called Duality. It's expensive, but is nonetheless interesting since it included the analog and the virtual console ideas all in one.

      Frontier Designs, (http://frontierdesign.com/Products/AlphaTrack), the company that makes the transport remote controller for DAW's, introduced a new product which is a virtual channel strip you can use to control any parameter of a workstation with three rotary knobs and a linear fader. It includes remote control functions. I love using dedicated controllers rather than a mouse, so I appreciated this very much. $199 list.

      An alliance of companies that seem to want to give Digidesign a challenge under the Synthax (synthax.com) umbrella had a very impressive suite of tools including the Samplitude/Sequoia DAW’s, RME with a huge line of audio interfaces for location and studio applications that make portable and studio audio affordable, and Algorhithmix, who make some fantastic plug-in EQ and audio restoration tools.

      Sonic Studio (www.sonicstudio.com) is showing their newly released mastering software, using their time-honored editing model based on the old Sonic, but brought up to date with the ability to use plug-ins and some of the best sample rate conversion software around.

      A company called RMG (www.atlasproaudio.com/rmg.html) had a fascinating display, not because they showed flash memory cards or hard disks but because along with those items they also showed newly manufactured analog tape. The company bought BASF and is making tape alongside digital storage. It's a one-stop idea for all your storage needs. Media is media, after all, whether magnetic or optical, but this company is looking ahead by looking backward too.

      Yet another DAW you ask … for $75? Can it possibly do all it says? An ambitious little company called XOWave is doing just that. Visit www.xowave.com and see for yourself.

      Blue Microphones showed what they call a professional-quality mic (www.bluemic.com/snowball_faq.php) that’s designed with the podcast in mind. It’s a large sphere with integrated preamp, A/D converter (44.1/16bit) and a USB output.

      Jonathan Wyner has mastered more than 4000 CDs during the last 21 years, spanning every musical idiom (and some nonmusical idioms as well!). He is adjunct professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass. Credits range from the extremely well known (James Taylor, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Kiri Te Kanawa) to the more idiosyncratic and independent artists/labels. Jonathan prides himself on the fact that he is among the elite group of mastering engineers to have run a marathon in under three hours repeatedly. Visit www.m-works.com

Jonathan Wyner has mastered more than 4000 CDs during the last 21 years, spanning every musical idiom (and some nonmusical idioms as well!). He is an adjunct professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass. Credits range from the extremely well known (James Taylor, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Kiri Te Kanawa) to the more idiosyncratic and independent artists/labels. Jonathan prides himself on the fact that he is among the elite group of mastering engineers to have run a marathon in under three hours repeatedly. Visit www.m-works.com.