We are pleased to invite AES Europe 2026 participants to a special reception at Copenhagen City Hall, offering a warm and official welcome to Denmark’s capital. Located in the very heart of the city, Copenhagen City Hall is one of the city’s most iconic landmarks. Designed by architect Martin Nyrop and inaugurated in 1905, the building is inspired by the medieval town hall of Siena, Italy. Its impressive interiors and renowned clock tower make it a fitting and memorable setting for this occasion.
At the reception, guests will be welcomed by the City of Copenhagen and enjoy a relaxed afternoon of networking with fellow conference participants. Refreshments will be served alongside the city’s much-loved specialty, the traditional Town Hall Pancake. We will hear a speech by an official person from the City Council followed by an interesting technical talk by Lars Risbo, CTO of Purifi, who will share a brilliant example of the danish contributions to the audio world:
Unreasonable Audio Innovation
The HiFi community is split into two camps we call “subjectivist” and “objectivist”. Subjectivists reject all measurements and only trust their ears. No explanation is too absurd so long as it doesn’t involve actual data. One of our products once drew this comment from a reviewer: “sounds surprisingly good for something that measures this well”. Objectivists obsess over spot measurements and double-blinded trials. If they are to be believed, almost nothing is audible. In spite of which they mindlessly seek to improve a handful of fixed metrics that too often are bad surrogate markers: “we’ve a recipe for this measurement, so that’s what we measure,” no matter the relevance to the end point of how it sounds. The human ear is amazing and complex: to some defects it is nearly deaf while to others it is mind-bendingly sensitive. Standard metrics do not cover that complexity. The two camps are so entrenched that neither is open to new ideas. This is even recognised in patent law: “technical prejudice” means you can prove an invention is not “obvious” because it goes against common but flawed beliefs. Shall we still depend on G. B. Shaw’s unreasonable man for making any progress or can we do better? To the subjectivist, audio is art. To the objectivist, it is science. We propose it is neither. Audio is engineering. Our task as engineers is building equipment and doing so in a rational manner. Doing a full blown DBT is only rational if the decision that’s at stake is an expensive one. It’s often cheaper and faster to fix a defect than to prove it’s audible. Standard measurements often miss glaring problems, so measurements must be designed with the specifics of the DUT in mind. It’s only after looking hard for bad news and not finding it that we can have some confidence that the news is good. This subtlety of approach can’t be arrived at simply by compromising between the objectivist and subjectivist positions. The pendulum must stop because the truth isn’t even in the middle. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw
Lars received his Ph.D. from DTU Denmark in1994 where he pioneered high-order Sigma-Delta Modulation theory and direct switching PCM-PWM audio amplifiers. He founded Toccata Technology (1996), which later was acquired by Texas Instruments where he was elected TI Fellow (2012) and TI Audio CTO (2013). In 2014 he Co-founded the award winning PURIFI Audio company together with Bruno Putzeys and Peter Lyngdorf. Here they conducted in depth research leading to its current break throughs in transducer and class D amplifier products. Lars has been granted numerous patents and published papers in the areas of audio digital signal processing, system-level and signal chain optimization, oversampled data converters, transducers and mixed-signal architectures.
Time:
2:40pm – 3:00pm Busses (4) leaving the Convention Venue (DTU) at staggered times
3:50pm Arrival to Copenhagen City Hall
4:00pm Welcome by Jan Abildgaard Pedersen, AES 160th Convention Chair Official Welcome to Copenhagen by an official member of the City Council of Copenhagen. Technical Presentation by Lars Risbo, CTO of Purifi Concluding Remarks by Jan Abildgaard Pedersen, AES 160th Convention Chair Networking, Refreshments and “Town Hall Pancakes”
5:30pm Departure from Copenhagen City Hall Self-organised Dinners at Restaurants in the Heart of Copenhagen or self-organised transport to your Hotels.
Cost Per Person: Included with paid registration
Event Capacity: 170 people: (first-come, first-served)
We look forward to welcoming you to an unforgettable afternoon at Copenhagen City Hall and to celebrating AES Europe 2026 together. We recommend that people find a group of interesting fellow participants during this reception and go for a dinner in one of the many restaurants around Copenhagen City Hall in the heart of Copenhagen.
*Photos from the City Hall by Astrid Maria Rasmusse2
To register for any of the events or tech tours highlighted on this page, you will need to visit the convention registration portal.
New registrations can add events at the time of their registration. For delegates already registered, you can add events to your existing registration. For more information on how to how to add events to your existing registration, please view this step-by-step guide.
