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Last wednesday I was invited on the “Obsessed with sound event of Philips” in the Galaxy studios in Mol. The purpose of this event is to submerge us in sound with one of their three heroes for the campagne, the producer of the soundtrack of batman begins, Geof Foster.

Bert Van Daele gave us a little history lesson about how Philips has and still is obsessed with sound since the beginning. Their main ideas since the beginning are that sound should be of best possible quality and sound should be available to everyone. Along those lines they created the first affordable radio in the 1920′s called “het kappelke”

In the 1940′s philips introduced the vinyl and created the philigraph. They kept on innovating in the 1950′s and they developed the kinetic tape. By the 1960′s Philips Hasselt developed the compact cassette and since then it became and still is the main music carrier. In 1968 they developed the cassette in the car. In the 70′s they developed the laser disc and they used the mpeg file format for video and audio. But in the 70′s the emphasis for Philips was more on video then on sound. In 1982 the audio cd was invented, it gave better quality and far more storage capacity. In the 90′s they started with DVD and SACD, where the DVD took of pretty well, the SACD was and still is a niche market. 2004 marked the date of the ambisound release and is another way to create surround sound without all the different speakers. And today we are here to see and hear the 360 sound speakers and systems.

Geof Foster was next up, he is the chief engineer for the batman begins soundtrack. He explained his workflow for making film music.

It all starts with spotting, which is basically putting some existing music against the different scenes. This process ends with a template to direct the composer. The second step is writing the music through the unique sound of the composer. The third part is scoring, this means choosing from the different sound generators like an orchestra. And the last part is a the actual mixing.

Geof gets involved mostly at the scoring stage, to record and create the sound, a big part of the scoring is choosing the layout and venue for the orchestra and the recording. He uses the batman begins soundtrack as an example. The recording is mostly done in separate parts. The very last thing is putting the music against the film and the sound of the movie itself. There is some more fine-tuning and listening if everything is in place.

Geoff also explained why the soundtrack is a little different from the music used in the film. Most music in the film is not always very interesting music wise, so they tweak it a bit for the OST

After that Bert explained what the 360Sound is all about. It’s aimed at people that like good sound, but the speaker system has to be stylish. The 360Sound system has a front facing speaker and two speakers on the sides. The speakers on the side are aimed at bouncing of the walls to create a surround sound. The 360Sound is completely developed in Leuven, be.

The last product is the free floating tweeter, where they created a speaker which creates a full 360 degrees sound experience when the speaker is placed in the middle of the room. I like the idea, although the sound is not perfect, it is nice to have a device that sounds ok and it doesn’t matter where you are in the room.

Philips also released a couple of iPhone/iPod dock speakers, they sound pretty awesome, but I don’t think they will take off until the one with the battery is released.

Because the whole event took place in the Galaxy studios in Mol, one of the best recording studios in the world, we were entitled to a tour trough the complex, complete with the a movie from the late 80′s filmed during the building of the complex. It was quite impressive to see what they all did to make sure the best sound is recorded.

You can check out the pictures at Flickr

I liked the event, I liked some of the products, but I’m not convinced they will take off with the high prices. I would have loved some more light to photograph the products. But thx Talking Heads and Philips for the invite and the Philips GoGear, which I will try to review a bitter later.

Yesterday I did some live blogging during the presentation, but last night and today I had some time to think about the evening and all the stuff we’ve seen. My initial thoughts are, the organisation could have been a bit better. Although the venue was very fine, the little food I got my hands on was good and the goodie bags were awesome.

The presentations could have been less confusing and the quiz afterwards should have been organized better. It was a very nice way of letting us vote, but apparently some of the remotes didn’t work, which off course manipulated the results quite a bit. Not that I was harmed by that, I just don’t know enough info about movies. Very important I think there should have been a round for questions after every presentation, because a lot of people had questions about the TV’s that could have been interesting for all of us.

But on the 3D itself now. I’m still not convinced about the whole concept of 3D. I don’t really like watching a movie in 3D, first of all, it still feels very unreal. The biggest drawback is that in order to experience 3D TV, you still need to wear a pair of glasses, who are btw very expensive.

Imagine following situation: you’re coming home after a day of work, you eat something, decide to watch some relaxing television, but wait…, where did I leave the glasses, I mean I’m already having trouble locating the remote control of the TV. Let’s say I found them, apparently our cat decided that the glasses were to play with and has left some scratches and bite marks all over it. Well, still not really a problem, let’s just try them on, oh wait, they are not charged anymore, because i forgot to put them in the USB charger. By now my relax evening of watching TV has been ruined already. So I decide to ditch the glasses, turn off the TV and get behind the computer to get some more work done. Great

This is fictional, for the moment, but at a certain point this could turn into reality. I don’t want that kind of reality. Give me a 2D screen, which I turn on, look for the remote for about a minute and further on I can watch the 50th rerun of “Allo, Allo” or something. I find it a pretty stupid concept to try to mimic 3D in film or a serie, because you can’t interact with the world that’s living around you. So in that perspective I think gaming in 3D has a future, yesterday I played a bit with avatar in 3D and I very much liked it. Because you are in the 3D environment you can better experience the game and interact with it. Although I still think that for a game to be using 3D to the fullest you really need to be in the middle of the game terrain, like it was promised with Virtual Reality.

All in all I had a fun evening, met some nice people, saw the regular crowd again and as usual shot some photos (find more in this set). But I don’t think anyone of the people at the event will buy a television that starts at 1800 euro with only 2 glasses and without a lot of quality content.

I have had some crazy ideas before and I’ve build quite a reputation of opening shops of my favourite brands and queueing for gadgets. When, last January I saw Steve jobs unveil the iPad, I was sold. I also knew I would be queueing for it when it became available in Europe.

So today was the day of the official release for the iPad In France. in the past days I have been researching a lot about the release on the internet. Well actually I was researching it with Pieter, we first thought of going to the fnac in Lille. It turned we could be left without an iPad to buy, so we decided to go to Paris.

Tonight at midnight we left for Paris accompanied by Sara and Davy. We arrived at 3h30 and found a parking spot surprisingly easy just around the corner of the apple store. There were already 6 people in front of us, but at least we knew we would have an iPad and so the waiting began.

When the hour got closer, Pieter and I were wondering about which one we would get, while Sara was deciding if she would get one. Unfortunately we didn’t have all the time waiting to decide because the press found out that there were some crazy Belgians in the queue. Most of them wanted to talk to us. We gave some interviews and were asked by a production crew of Apple to be followed while and after buying the iPad. We even got an iTunes gift certificate of 15€ out of it.

I haven’t found all the links to the videos and articles yet but I’ll add them once I’ve found them.

This post is typed on the iPad and I found it pretty pleasing to type a small blogpost like this one in the WP app. After playing with it for the last hour I’m even more convinced that I wanted this device. I’ll write a review and some app recommendations later aft i used it for an extended time.