AES Headphone Conference in Finland wrapped up
It's a challenge to find a more appropriate location than Aalto, a truly premier-league sound and acoustics academy, which year after year produces new researchers for top companies around the world. The event was a truly enjoyable homecoming to many.
The well-attended conference connected the dots above, with a great talk by Laura Sinnott
covering the centre we tend to overlook: the auditory system and listening safety. Fundamental
aspects of sensing were also at the core of Karlheinz Brandenburg’s lecture, of how humans are
active listeners reaching out for stimuli rather than just receivers. Neither topic should be ignored when it comes to the professional use of headphones.
Lecture hall at the university where most of the busy programme took place.
At the conference keynote, Sean Olive summarised Harman’s thorough research on the most
likeable headphone frequency response for listeners generally, while Kimio Hamasaki and Tore
Stegenborg-Andersen presented methods for personal evaluation of headphone timbre. The latter
was based on systematic listening tests when headphone sound colour was compared to precision
nearfield monitoring.
The hard problem of monitoring, time-domain features/distortion of the listening room, was expertly discussed by Tapio Lokki, who described four recent articles in JAES, written together with Janne Riionheimo, about cinema, music and audio formats from stereo to 3D.
Timbral and spatial neutrality are two essential pieces of the sensory puzzle to solve before global organisations like ITU or AES are able to standardise the use of headphones in monitoring to any extent comparable to in-room systems adhering to ITU-R BS.1116, BS.775 and BS.2051.
A big thank you to the organising committee for a brilliant conference, including Vesa Välimäki,
Johannes Arend, Juha Backman and my good colleague, Aki Mäkivirta, director of R&D at
Genelec. Thank you also Laura Sinnott and Joao Martins for the extra pictures here.
We will do our best to keep a high bar at the 2026 AES convention in Copenhagen, when another
Nordic university, excelling in sound and acoustics, Denmark’s DTU, opens its doors to the next
global gathering of all people, thoughts and things pro audio.
The after-event evenings were also not for resting. On one of them, most attendees gathered at Helsinki's Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, where Genelec invited everyone for even more listening, tasting and talking. We also couldn't resist installing a 3D playback room – or introducing the professional ultra nearfield and headphone tools we're working on.
Headphone listening station with Genelec 8331 monitors, 9320 monitor controller, 8550 headphones and Aural ID binaural renderer.
Genelec CTO Aki Mäkivirta presenting the Genelec items mentioned above, known collectively as the “UNIO Ecosystem”.
Before flying back, Laura explored the old and primeval forest, Haltiala, Helsinki’s Central Park, green on the map and double size the one in New York City. Dipoli is marked, and Arabia district, home to Metropolia and the Genelec office.
Main image: Alvar Aalto’s iconic Dipoli building, where the 2025 AES conference was held; and the dots it set out to connect.