Columbus, Ohio – The Columbus Section of the Audio Engineering Society is pleased to announce it has elected officers for its inaugural term. The election was held on July 18, 2021 at Secret Studio, 503 West Walnut Street Columbus Ohio 43215, where members voted for Lesley Fogle (Hear No Evil Sound) as Chair, Keith Hanlon (Secret Studio) as Vice-Chair, and Rob Powell (Uncoiled Studio) as Secretary/Treasurer.
The AES Columbus section was started to bring together a cohesive network of audio professionals serving multiple industries to share knowledge and stay current in their field. After well over a year of planning, the AES Columbus section was approved by the Board of Governors in June of 2020, making Columbus AES’ first section born in a pandemic. “We started by locating the fifteen minimum members to start a section,” Fogle said. “Several people had to apply to HQ to upgrade from Associate to Professional status which is usually done with references from a professional section which Ohio did not have. So the planning took some time and of course the pandemic was not a motivating factor. But we now have 35 members who are professionals in recording arts, education, corporate, radio, entertainment, automotive infotainment, live sound, product design, etc.”
With elections over, AES Columbus’ first social event will be Sunday, October 3rd, 3pm, at MusicMax Inc in North Franklinton. This event is open to the entire audio industry (RSVP to aescolumbus@gmail.com) and features a tour of MusicMax’s new facility and demos of equipment from WesAudio, Elysia, Audinate, and Fredenstein. In addition, there will be a demonstration of AES member Dennis Althar’s ULD TD transformerless loudspeaker design. Althar Audio systems are installed in many Ohio spaces such as the Cleveland Museum of Art.
One of the first orders of business for AES Columbus is the Professional Resources Committee is compiling a directory for the Ohio region. “A healthy creative industry has options and understands their talent pool,” Fogle said, “Many of us regularly field questions such as: Who is mixing in Dolby Atmos, does remote sessions, live music, conference events, installs sound reinforcement? Where can we rent a sound stage? What products are designed locally? There are so many specialties in the audio field and we want to have this info organized and accessible to bring in more opportunities.”
The Audio Engineering Society, founded in 1948, is the only professional society devoted exclusively to audio technology. There are currently over 12,000 AES members in over 210 sections worldwide.