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[Mac Kerr]

What consoles are they using in the main venue this year? Are you integrating Rocknet again or is everything on Dante and Rio boxes?

This year Plenary has a CL5 and a CL1 for production, the first 2 bands will have a Profile, the second 2 another CL5. I will add a 9th Rio to get the split from the band CL5. I will have to have a scene that repatches the inputs for the second band because the console already has all 88 inputs used.

Mac

[Mac Kerr]

What consoles are they using in the main venue this year? Are you integrating Rocknet again or is everything on Dante and Rio boxes?

In addition to the consoles previously mentioned there is also an SD7 for Mons.

Last evening and this morning I spent way too much time trying to get a couple of RMio64s to sync to a video router that has a MADI interface for audio. Ideally the RMio would derive its clock on the MADI side from the MADI input. For some reason the Yamaha boxes would not recognize the MADI from the Snell router, and the router wouldn't recognize the MADI from the RMio. The router has no WC in or out, only MADI. Four of us spent the better part of 8hrs sweating bullets trying to get this to work because the whole show depends on it. We had each test the interface the prior week, independently. I connected the MADI out of my RMio to a Digico SD9 to monitor the MADI, and in Vegas the video company used a QL1 to monitor the Dante from their RMio connected to the router. In both cases audio passed fine. Under pressure in the control room with little time, nothing worked.

This morning with a fresher perspective (and the addition of a Big Ben) we were able to clock the Big from video black burst to keep the clock in sync with video, and then use the WC out of the Big Ben to drive the SRC clock input of the RMios and the main production console, which is the Dante system master. This made it work. There sure was a lot less tension in the room after that got fixed.

After the band splitters were just about used up we found out one of the artists will be bringing 12 channels of playback. Oy!

Tomorrow we start to rehearse, the Plenary sessions started rehearsing today.

Mac

[Neil White]

Last evening and this morning I spent way too much time trying to get a couple of RMio64s to sync to a video router that has a MADI interface for audio. Ideally the RMio would derive its clock on the MADI side from the MADI input. For some reason the Yamaha boxes would not recognize the MADI from the Snell router, and the router wouldn't recognize the MADI from the RMio.

That sounds stressful. As the Big Ben solved the problem, I assume it is down to some sort of clocking issue. It was my understanding from the manual that the RMio could operate in exactly the manner you describe, with the Dante side being clocked to the Dante network, and the MADI side clocked to the incoming MADI stream, with Sample Rate Conversion enabled on the RMio. We have a RMio in rental stock here and do a lot of broadcast work, so it would be interesting to hear if you get to the bottom of what was preventing this from working as expected. Are you only sending audio signal to the router or are signals also being deembedded from video and sent back to your console?

For the future, the Direct Out MADI SRC allows sample rate conversion of MADI synced directly to Video Black Burst. http://www.directout.eu/en/products/madi.src.html

[Mac Kerr]

That sounds stressful.

Everything here seems to be stressful. Last night we line checked and set starting levels for the first and second bands that perform tomorrow night, today we did the last band, tomorrow just before the show we do the third act.

Lots of routing in Dante Controller. Here is a view of our Dante Controller screen. These devices are connected by 7 pairs of switches. The pix270s let us do 64ch of recording so we can multitrack the first two bands on one, and the other 2 on the other.

[Mac Kerr]

Everything here seems to be stressful.

[Mac Kerr]

A couple more images. A2 Mark wildly surfing the Interwebs along with my web and network management computers, and some our local connectivity.

Two of the phones are for comm to London for a Skype conference, two are for IFB from TV studios in town who are shooting from here.

Mac

[Mac Kerr]

The Chief finally arrives...

[Tim Padrick]

Sometimes I'm glad that I'm not nearly smart enough to do any of that stuff.

[Jens Palm Bacher]

I can't help but think it would be much simpler to do in a pure MADI world.
One of these as matrix and then a MADI send/return out to each console.

No firmware trouble, all routing  stored in one place (so you can change out a console or breakout box without problems), easy to clock to video (the router has trilevel/BB sync in) and fibre directly out of of the matrix.

[Mac Kerr]

I can't help but think it would be much simpler to do in a pure MADI world.
One of these as matrix and then a MADI send/return out to each console.

It is certainly a way. It might be simpler if all the gear used the same protocol, but there is no guarantee that Madi would be that either, and this event is not about linking a bunch of consoles together, but a bunch of different venues in different locations. Currently the fiber infrastructure is based on multiple stars which cannot really be done with Madi, and except for the 112ch from the main room, a significant amount of the routing is comm, which means having a lot of Madi stage racks all over the place. It is easy with Dante to drop relatively inexpensive 16x8 boxes or 8 output boxes where we need them. Other than possibly easier interfacing to the Madi video router I don't think there is a great advantage to the routing all being in one box rather than on the network. Being all Madi is not a guarantee that the video router would sync without the same kind of solution we used. Our difficulty was that although the interface was tested in 2 different shops, on location the 2 Madi streams did not recognize each other. Even after we solved the sync in getting my Madi into the router we could not connect the output of the router back to the Dante interface without losing sync again.

This event was also easier when we did it all with a Studer Vista console, but the budget did not allow us to continue with that console. Using a couple of CL-5s and Dante as replacement for a $350,000 Studer setup was definitely a financial decision, but it was one that was only possible to make because we were able to duplicate the functionality of the Studer routing system. We saved money, but we did not sacrifice functionality.

Mac

[ProSoundWeb Community]