Another benefit of specifying an open standard for audio transport is that it helps establish better (grounds of communication) between the audio department and IT.
Vikram Kirby, the director of technical design at Thinkwell, a design firm that specializes in large-scale attractions, notes, “When we talked to IT about what we wanted the system to do, we were able to point them to specific IEEE standards, which was much more palatable to them than trying to describe the traffic patterns of a proprietary format.”
This ability to speak the same language established a common ground between many different departments, and ultimately led to a network design that included a complete AVB backbone.
Unifying the network in this way represents a significant reduction in infrastructure costs, since it eliminates the need to have multiple, separate networks for different kinds of traffic, which also leads to a reduction of installation and maintenance costs.
Because the AVB protocols are able to safely partition legacy traffic from audio content, the IT department can have visibility into the behavior of all network traffic, which also reduces some of the burden on audio professionals to perform their own network troubleshooting.
Stepping Forward
Using AVB streams provides optimizations in other areas as well. Because the switches are intimately involved in the audio distribution, they are able to intelligently optimize the bandwidth required by streams that are received by multiple other devices.
For instance, if a single-channel, pre-recorded announcement is sent from a playback device to a single loudspeaker, the bandwidth on the network link between the playback device and the network switch is the same as if it were distributed to an entire building’s set of loudspeakers.
Another priority for many system designers is clocking and consistent time-alignment. An AVB network includes a deterministic, visible network clock to guarantee fixed low-latency across all connected devices.
Audio networks no longer have to be designed to account for the worst-case latency, as was common practice when using legacy Ethernet. Designers can now rely on latency as low as 125 microseconds per network hop, which for small networks moves network latency almost below the threshold of consideration.
All of these changes represent a significant and inevitable step forward in networking technology for live sound, and with the certification program for network switches starting soon, and endpoint certification starting not long after, the era of fractured, proprietary networking formats will soon be a thing of the past.
Ellen Juhlin is digital products analyst for Meyer Sound.