​The refreshed  Clarity board  has Tom Barron (PMC) chairman; Andy Clough (Haymarket); Geoff Coleman (Acoustica); Phil Hansen (Red Sheep Communications); Geoff Mathews (Soundcraft Hi-Fi); Ian Sutton (B&W); Simon Talbot (Bartletts HiFi); Richard Trotter (Arcam) and Trevor Wilson (Naim). Retiring chairman, Laurence Armstrong (Henley Designs), remains on the board in an ex-officio capacity. The board also agreed to co-opt Elizabeth Gould (Martins Hi-Fi). Roger Batchelor and Alan Sircom have both retired from the board and thanks were expressed to them for their hard work and contributions to the running of Clarity over the past few years. Following the  board meeting /AGM , with the election of new officers and the admission of new  industry members  including NAIM and Focal,  the Clarity conference kicked off in the Dolby Theatre with an  opening  presentation by Venkat Venkateshwaran of Dolby with a couple of movie excerpts including the Revenant, showing off their double laser projector with full dynamic range Dolby Vision together with an upgraded and still more powerful full surround object based ATMOS sound. This is only complete UK installation of its kind, one of only four in Europe. Forewarned, I knew this system could blow a massive racket and wore 10dB attenuating defenders just in case.  

​Clarity, the UK Hi Fi trade association, held their annual trade event at Dolby Soho Square, with a packed set of presentations including a brief introduction to Dolby Vision (HDR), an upcoming video standard delivering higher contrast, 4,000:1 and said to be a greater performance gain visually than current 4k is over 720p. There is a higher contrast high def format already, HDR 10, which ideally is a tasty 10-bit resolution at up to 1,000 nits. Dolby Vision will do up to 4k nits (and it really is really bright with a good laser projector!) at a 12 bit dynamic range. In addition, like the Atmos sound standard optimising the playback sound channels, this video format adapts and scales the incoming data to best match the video playback you are using. Seen at 2016 CES several manufacturers have adopted it including Vizio and LG.

London AES Meeting
De Vere Rooms, High Holborn, London
By Bob Stewart and Peter Craven

With his formidable understanding of psychoacoustics Bob took the audience through a lightning review of more recent literature and discovery in psychoacoustics, in so doing illuminating how older listeners with some loss of high frequency sensitivity could still show high sensitivity to subtle sound quality differences.