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AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

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Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#21

Post by qppo »

jand wrote: post #7

This sounds like fun tech. But isn't this dead before it really lifts off? Intel 1588 is not supported by every customer-NIC, and far from supported by most switches and such. So if i have to build a "special" hardware environment anyway, why use AES67 and not some other proprietary solution without IP which may (? or may not) deliver better latency and jitter? Last time i checked (which is a while back), the same su…

It's not DoA, the tech has been in production for close to 15 years. If you've been to Disneyland you've heard audio broadcast over IP, or watched a match of League of Legends (or virtually anything that comes out of a stadium). Hell if conventions were still around, go to NAB or AES and look for the "we speak Dante" signs everywhere.

The problem AES67 solves is that there are multiple competing standards and it's difficult or impossible to connect them over the same network. The standard is there to unify under one protocol. The tech problem was delivering audio in sync over large networks, and rather than use custom hardware they used commodity networking gear and network protocols (not doing that might seem crazy, but that's generally what happens in high end audio). But even then, you probably have some special hardware in your environment to connect microphones and speakers to the network in the first place.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#22

Post by qppo »

aidenn0 wrote: post #20
qppo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I've been going to AES67 meetings and talks for several years and worked on AoIP products, I don't think I've ever met someone from the automotive industry or heard they used the protocols that AES67 is going to supplant/integrate with (Dante, Ravenna, etc). The standards committees members were professional and commercial audio manufacturers. This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your spe…

What's the advantage to this versus a more traditional PA system? Just fewer wires to run?

The big win is distributed audio networks. For example an esports match might have play-by-play and commentary in 20 languages, in traditional sportscasting they fly those folks out on location. What they do for League of Legends (and a lot of international sportscasting) is use AoIP to send the stream back to their studio, multicast to commentator crews around the world, multicast back to the studio, multiplex into the simulcast, and broadcast out on their streaming platforms. (Also I'm recalling this info from a talk at an AES meeting from about 18 months ago so if anyone from Riot has better intel, please correct me!)

Onsite, it's not feasible to use miles of cable for analog signals (and it is miles, in large venues). Even with balanced connections you start getting noise problems after a few hundred feet. Digital conversion closer to the sources solves this issue, which means those DACs and ADCs need to be networked somehow. Building infrastructure for corporate networks onsite is a mostly solved problem with lots of cheap hardware available, so they just use that and place custom gear with the converters at the input/output locations. Not to mention if lighting is involved, noise can get really quite bad.

It's just all around more modular, cheaper at scale, effective, and foolproof than full analog.

There's also a whole bunch of less sexy use cases in corporate environments where a PA doesn't work at all.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#23

Post by tonyarkles »

qppo wrote: post #22
aidenn0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the advantage to this versus a more traditional PA system? Just fewer wires to run?

The big win is distributed audio networks. For example an esports match might have play-by-play and commentary in 20 languages, in traditional sportscasting they fly those folks out on location. What they do for League of Legends (and a lot of international sportscasting) is use AoIP to send the stream back to their studio, multicast to commentator crews around the world, multicast back to the studio, multiplex into…

Even just a digital snake! A pair of Ethernet cables is way way way easier to set up than a 24 channel analog snake. Plus... need a couple more inputs? Just throw another stage box up there and connect it to the switch.

I’m not in the industry but my wife is, and AES67 seems like a complete game changer.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#24

Post by sethhochberg »

tonyarkles wrote: post #23
qppo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big win is distributed audio networks. For example an esports match might have play-by-play and commentary in 20 languages, in traditional sportscasting they fly those folks out on location. What they do for League of Legends (and a lot of international sportscasting) is use AoIP to send the stream back to their studio, multicast to commentator crews around the world, multicast back to the studio, multiplex into…

Even just a digital snake! A pair of Ethernet cables is way way way easier to set up than a 24 channel analog snake. Plus... need a couple more inputs? Just throw another stage box up there and connect it to the switch. I’m not in the industry but my wife is, and AES67 seems like a complete game changer.

Yep. I was heavily involved in the live sound world right in the chapter where copper snakes were being replaced with early digital snakes, and even that was a game-changer enough on its own. Less weight, less unpredictability (even in good copper snakes, the wires are _tiny_ and prone to breakage in entertainment use), more channels, less need to differentiate between your sends and returns and keep corresponding adapters around if you had a return-heavy mix, far better options for performers to make their own unique monitor mixes on stage instead of relying on whatever submixes could be sent back from the console on the returns that happened to be available.

And that was just the early days, when even the protocols that sometimes used Ethernet were only L1 and L2 and not IP-compatible/routable. You might have had several lines of ethernet running back and forth to the stage, but couldn't comingle snakes with IP-based control systems.

AES67 and friends pushed the industry to a point where, basically, everything speaks IP. The stage remains an analog realm up to the DIs and mic premaps, and everything can be routed and distributed in almost infinite combinations from there with commodity hardware.

Its seriously as impactful as the shift from tape to digital recording in terms of the new workflow options and paradigms it opened up.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#25

Post by j_spencer »

I work in a lot of live sound settings and it's common to see Dante[1] cards coming with a lot of audio consoles these days. It's a proprietary protocol (with support for 1024 channels at 32-bit / 192kHz over a single link); add-in cards for consoles can be quite expensive.

A lot of the time, we're needing to connect devices to Dante through a Dante interface (which can be expensive) or via a Dante Virtual Soundcard.

It will be interesting to see AES67 appearing more in consoles, especially lower end consoles. Hopefully this will open up Audio over IP to more audio professionals without resorting to proprietary protocols which can make it hard to connect systems from various vendors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_(networking)

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#26

Post by detaro »

qppo wrote: post #17
bsder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't this dead before it really lifts off? No, because automotive is the use case driving this and consumer/professional audio will come along for the ride. Think about how you synchronize the LCDs and speakers in an SUV--Ethernet is way easier than just about any other solution. The biggest obstacle to adoption in the consumer/prosumer space is the fact that everybody killed Ethernet ports on their laptops.

What? I've been going to AES67 meetings and talks for several years and worked on AoIP products, I don't think I've ever met someone from the automotive industry or heard they used the protocols that AES67 is going to supplant/integrate with (Dante, Ravenna, etc). The standards committees members were professional and commercial audio manufacturers. This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your spe…

Re automotive audio and Ethernet, AVB is kind of a thing in automotive, or at least some vendors try to make it one.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#27

Post by bsder »

qppo wrote: post #17
bsder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't this dead before it really lifts off? No, because automotive is the use case driving this and consumer/professional audio will come along for the ride. Think about how you synchronize the LCDs and speakers in an SUV--Ethernet is way easier than just about any other solution. The biggest obstacle to adoption in the consumer/prosumer space is the fact that everybody killed Ethernet ports on their laptops.

What? I've been going to AES67 meetings and talks for several years and worked on AoIP products, I don't think I've ever met someone from the automotive industry or heard they used the protocols that AES67 is going to supplant/integrate with (Dante, Ravenna, etc). The standards committees members were professional and commercial audio manufacturers. This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your spe…

I was being kind and lumping AES67 in with TSN/AVB (time-sensitive networking/audio-video bridging).

If I'm being snarky, AES67 is a last ditch effort by the proprietary vendors to remain relevant before AVB/TSN wipes them out.

Before Covid, it seemed like Presonus was wiring up every new church I knew of with AVB/TSN.

> This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your speakers

Automotive companies do not regard that as trivial. Copper is heavy and expensive and difficult to route. LCDs are in the ceiling and speakers are in the floor. The only common point is at the (literal, in this case) firewall.

Collapsing everything to a few pairs of Ethernet is a big deal for them.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#29

Post by rasz »

bsder wrote: post #13
jand wrote: post #7

This sounds like fun tech. But isn't this dead before it really lifts off? Intel 1588 is not supported by every customer-NIC, and far from supported by most switches and such. So if i have to build a "special" hardware environment anyway, why use AES67 and not some other proprietary solution without IP which may (? or may not) deliver better latency and jitter? Last time i checked (which is a while back), the same su…

> But isn't this dead before it really lifts off? No, because automotive is the use case driving this and consumer/professional audio will come along for the ride. Think about how you synchronize the LCDs and speakers in an SUV--Ethernet is way easier than just about any other solution. The biggest obstacle to adoption in the consumer/prosumer space is the fact that everybody killed Ethernet ports on their laptops.

I know Americans love big SUVs, but I dont think even they managed to build something so large as to require compensating for the sound propagation delay.

Re: AES67 resources – Audio over IP protocol

#30

Post by lukeh »

bsder wrote: post #27
qppo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I've been going to AES67 meetings and talks for several years and worked on AoIP products, I don't think I've ever met someone from the automotive industry or heard they used the protocols that AES67 is going to supplant/integrate with (Dante, Ravenna, etc). The standards committees members were professional and commercial audio manufacturers. This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your spe…

I was being kind and lumping AES67 in with TSN/AVB (time-sensitive networking/audio-video bridging). If I'm being snarky, AES67 is a last ditch effort by the proprietary vendors to remain relevant before AVB/TSN wipes them out. Before Covid, it seemed like Presonus was wiring up every new church I knew of with AVB/TSN. > This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your speakers Automotive companies do…

AVB/TSN has a lot of great things about it but it's a market failure outside of proprietary audio systems (e.g. Avid, Presonus) and the automative world. The fact that it requires not just the endpoints (which themselves require an Ethernet chipset with multiple send/receive queues and hardware time stamping) but all network switches to support 802.1AS, MSRP, MVRP, etc creates a stalemate between vendors (waiting for a deployed base) and customers (waiting for market availability).

My personal opinion is that AES67 will eventually win. Dante has the installed base for now, and it can operate in an AES67 interoperability mode (albeit with quite a few limitations). SMPTE 2110-30 is essentially AES67. AES/TSN will limp along within homogeneous networks with Dante/AES67 at the edges where interoperability is required.

Don't get me wrong, I like AVB (see other post about AES67/AVB bridge), even though it has some quirks, e.g. the relationship between PTP and media clocks is a lot more straightforward in AES67.

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