About Supperware

I am Ben Supper, an audio engineer who currently lives in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.

For just over four years, I have been working for Focusrite as a research and development engineer. I also freelance as an electronic designer and a building acoustics consultant. I design a number of products for the Focusrite and Novation brands, taking care of hardware, firmware, DSP algorithms, and production testing for the ISA 828 digital card, nio 2|4, nocturn (but none of the ones with piano keys attached), launchpad, dicer, Twitch, and Impulse.

I was also responsible for the VRM algorithm, of which I am particularly proud, as it started well and continues to improve, and I put the DSP in the Pro 24 DSP. When time allows, I publish technical papers.

Before all this, I helped to design a digital mixing console for Cadac that never shipped and, even before that, I was an academic. I've got a PhD in spatial psychoacoustics from the University of Surrey, did the Tonmeister degree there, currently belong to the Audio Engineering Society committee and the IET, and generally enjoy writing, teaching, learning, and making fun things.

My email address is ben@ this domain name, or ben@ my employer's domain name. Both are checked daily. Everything here has been posted without my employer's endorsement, but I'm sure they won't mind.

Patents

WO2010146346 • Audio processing device using a library of virtual environment effects.

US2009238371 • System, devices and methods for predicting the perceived spatial quality of sound processing and reproducing equipment.

Academic Publications

AES convention paper 8267 • Processing and improving a head-related impulse response database for auralization. November 2010.

AES convention paper 7994 • Characterising studio monitor loudspeakers for auralization. May 2010.

AES convention paper 6068 • A lateral angle tool for spatial auditory analysis. May 2004.

IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing • An auditory onset detection algorithm for improved automatic source localization. May 2006.

AES convention paper 5767 • A new approach to detecting auditory onsets within a binaural stream. March 2003. Use the IEEE paper or the PhD thesis instead, though: the work is more mature.

My PhD Thesis • An onset-guided spatial analyser for binaural audio. Published in March 2005.

My undergraduate technical project • Virtual reality reproduction of loudspeaker stereo recordings. Finished in March 2000. I still get asked for this once or twice a year.

Lectures

You, a room, and a pair of headphones: A lesson in binaural audio • 130th AES Convention, London, May 2011.

Headphone Processing for a three-dimensional world • AES British Section lecture, July 2010.

VRM podcast • My script; my processing; alas, not my voice.

Articles About My Work

Professional Monitors in a Box • Pro Sound News Europe, June 2011.

Lin-Ear Monitoring • Pro Sound News Europe, October 2010.

Writer for Hire

Various lecture reports • Audio Engineering Society.

Audio Precision APx515 analyser review • Pro Sound News Europe, April 2011.

Launchpad Programmer's Reference Manual • Focusrite, 2008.