Solotech Talks at the Audio Engineering Society Conference in Le Mans

Solotech’s Technical Director in the UK, Nick Lythgoe was invited to be part of a discussion panel entitled ‘ The Audience As Paramount’ at the fourth annual AES Society conference in Le Mans which took place in late January.

On its website the AES describes itself as ‘Created by the industry, for the industry, as a non-profit volunteer based organization, designed to inspire, educate and promote the technology and practice of audio, by bringing leading people and ideas together.’ The conference ‘aims to bring together the minds of leading researchers and practitioners to discuss novel ideas and to foster the next generation of innovators in the industry through the promotion of inclusivity and diversity through student initiatives.’

Nick Lythgoe commented, ‘It was an honour to be invited onto the panel. It’s testament to the high regard Solotech, alongside other audio rental houses, hold within the academic audio community. I had a certain amount of trepidation before hand, many of the delegates have half an alphabet of letters after their names, whereas I left school without a single O-Level.”

“However, practical application and experience is as important, if not more important than theory when it comes to Live Production. You can have the most expensive high tech system but ultimately if you don’t point it in the right direction it’s not going to deliver for the audience. Similarly, take the most expensive headset microphone with years of R&D behind it, then place it incorrectly on a lecturer and evey time he scratches his beard all the audience hear is a load of noise.”

The panel was chaired by Jon Burton, former FOH engineer for the Prodigy and Biffy Clyro and now lecturer of Audio Engineering at Derby University. Joining Jon and Nick were Jonathan Digby, Katerina Panagopoulou and Nathan Lively.

The Audio Engineering Society