The Upcoming Annual Banquet:

Guest Speaker Dr. Barry Blesser

The world is changing. Computers, DSP, and other digital technologies affect more than just how we record sound: they're also turning the engineering and economic structure of our entire industry upside-down. Old ideas about equipment design and manufacturing, studio techniques, and even career education will crumble in the years ahead. Those who don't adapt will be discarded; those who understand these transforma- tions will have a chance at survival.

Few people are in a better position to understand these changes than Dr. Barry Blesser. A former president of the Audio Engineering Society, he invented the first commercial digital reverb in 1976 (the highly successful EMT-250 series). He was one of the founding engineers of Lexicon, and his seminal 1978 paper on DSP was the first to relate practical real-time computer processing to high-end audio. His latest venture, consultman- agement.com, helps engineers and managers cope with the risks these new paradigms create.

But this won't be an evening of dull predictions and mathematical mod- els. Dr. Blesser is an engaging and humorous speaker and former award- winning Associate Professor at MIT (he once described a company's relationship to cutting-edge technology as riding an elephant: get too far ahead and be trampled; fall behind and slip in the...). He'll use his histori-

cal perspective and fount of industry war stories to illus- trate his points. You can expect to be both enter- tained and challenged by his comments.