Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Other digital Audio connection protocols: Toslink, AES50, AES67 (Ravenna), Dante, AVB, AES10 (MADI). Then for stage connection basically every mixer manufacture has their own protocol with Allen Heaths SLink, Soundcraft’s Ultranet/SI Link, Yamaha’s TWINLANe and YGDAI, Roland’s REAC, Avid’s AVB-based Stage 64, and DiGiCo’s Optocore/SD-Rack links...

Most of them use standard CAT cables for this since that is what has been made for the transmission of network data for reasonably long distances. You can replace the RJ-45 plugs with Ethercon connectors if you need it extra rugged and reliable.

Ravenna, AVB and MADI are already existing, open standards that do even more, but I guess they are too expensive because of the ultra low latency requirements and FPGAs involved.

The use of an specialized automotive audio bus IC is interesting and probably gets the cost down, but within a car cable lengths are rarely comparable to what would happen in a concert venue. According to Behringer there is a 15m max cable distance per spec. That is.. too low for practise. Maybe for a small rehearsal room or so, but if you go from a front of house mixer to the stage 15m is nothing, especially if you can't run it the direct way.

Nice of them opening it up still.

AES67 is the open standard, ravenna and dante are extensions/alterations of it (well dante preceded aes67 but can be run in aes67 compatibility) and none of them require FPGAs, they usually use FPGAs to keep latency very low but they work just fine with any network card that supports PTPv2 and in dante case it’s not even that strict.

Go grab the ravenna docs, it’s pretty close to the spec for AES67 with added details for how to communicate metadata. You will find it, SMPTE2110 and the likes is all built on-top of existing standards (RTP, PTP, amongst others), even AVB which has much stricter requirements regarding latency is the same. These aren’t complex proprietary standards, they are standards which just specifies restrictions and interactions between other standards.

What I’m getting at is the Klark Teknik and Behringer after then refusing to use these standards as their interconnect is the industry outlier, the only other example in this discussion which still has relevance is Allen and Heath and they now do actually support Dante stage boxes on their models.

Twinlan and the other examples were never the only options, Digico and soundcraft support madi by default, Yamaha effectively spurred dante into existence in the live industry. Their proprietary protocol are there to solve problems that cannot be solved with the standard interconnect, usually latency or channel count or both.

> These aren’t complex proprietary standards,

They aren't proprietary, but they are complex standards, and sometimes somewhat incomplete. AES67, for instance, is somewhat crippled by not having a control plane (for that you need AES70, not well supported, or various NMOS standards). AVB requires special network switches.

Behringer doesn't really refuse to support standards. They offer Dante and MADI cards for their X32 and Wing mixers. They have AES50 built in as well. I think StageConnect and UltraNet are intended to be a cheaper/simpler/more limited alternative for people who don't need the full physical range and flexibility of Dante.

Total cable length is 40m, 15m between nodes. Maybe in a non-car environment these can be stretched, because the needed noise margins are lower?

https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...

That would be the interesting information. I can't imagine Behringer didn't test the parctical limits before running a digital signal via unknown impedance XLR cables.

So if they did these tests it would be nice to know the actual limits that were observed in the field.

Most likely automotive stuff is specified with huge safety margins.

For a car audio system?

Behringer drives that through a bog-standard unknown impedance XLR microphone cable. I am not saying more than 15m aren't possible, what I am saying is that this is a thing Behringer would need to mention. E.g. "Internal tests have shown that cable runs up to 100m are possible even with problematic electromagnetic interference coming from a generator".

Then you know what to expect, cause I would like to think they ran that kind of test before buying that AD IC in bulk and deploying it in their designs.

I agree that 15m is somewhat short, but I think this is intended to offer a lower cost offering, but be an alternative the the other networks they already support.

I for one am eager for audio networking standards to become more accessible. My biggest hopes would probably have been for a control plane protocol for AES67 to gain critical mass and force Dante and Ravenna to support it, but in the mean time this could be a nice alternative for some use cases as well.

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