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0 pointsaidenn05y ago0 comments

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

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qppo5y ago

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.

tonyarkles5y ago

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.

sethhochberg5y ago

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.

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