Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Andrew Broughton]

What’s the deal with L’Acoustics, Meyer and Avid choosing AVB?
What was it that Dante couldn’t do that AVB can?

[Geert Friedhof]

AVB is an open IEEE standard, which anyone can use without licensing.

d&b audiotechnik, L-Acoustics, Luminex and Meyer Sound have been developing Milan (for AVB) for several years now. They don't want to be 'limited by one company’s vision and its future development and support decisions for its technology'. I bet you they were thinking about a certain Australian company...

Wondering where that leaves AES67 though.

[Justice C. Bigler]

Funny how the companies with the most proprietary infrastructure systems all want the open standard.

Except that AVB, or TSN as it's now called, isn't even a finalized standard. Which is why Audinate went and implemented Dante....Because they got tires of waiting around for AVB to be finalized. That was like 10 or 12 years ago now. And itsy still not finalized.

Once they finish their video implementation for Dante, I bet they surpass AVB and Milan, as well as AES67 and Raveena all put together by a country mile.

Dante is just so easy and flexible to use and only requires off the shelf networking products where as AVB has to be specifically built into the switches.

[Andrew Broughton]

We're talking about some of the most expensive products in the business. The cost of a Dante License wouldn't even show up as a rounding error on their products.

What I'm getting at, is what is it about AVB TECHNICALLY which made them decide to use it over anything else?

I've not seen anything on the 'net about it except them touting how great it is, but not listing anything that couldn't be done just as easily with Dante.
A big downside seems to be Redundancy. I'm not sure if there's a way to have a Primary and Secondary cabling system with AVB.

[Justice C. Bigler]

From the discussions I've have with both L-Acoustics and Meyer people, they seem to dislike something about the latency or clocking of Dante. Somehow they think that it's not tight enough or has some errors inherent to it. Or something.

But you are right, the lack of redundancy is a HUGE drawback to AVB. Also, the lack of being able to use off the shelf networking products is another HUGE drawback.


It seems to me that console and interface manufacturers are jumping on to Dante, while the speaker and amp manufacturers are jumping on the AVB bandwagon. Not sure why that dicatomy exists though.


Once upon a time, Dante was supposed to be fully AVB compliant. Then I think AVB changed their protocol to purposely exclude Dante.

[Lee Buckalew]

We're talking about some of the most expensive products in the business. The cost of a Dante License wouldn't even show up as a rounding error on their products.

What I'm getting at, is what is it about AVB TECHNICALLY which made them decide to use it over anything else?

I've not seen anything on the 'net about it except them touting how great it is, but not listing anything that couldn't be done just as easily with Dante.
A big downside seems to be Redundancy. I'm not sure if there's a way to have a Primary and Secondary cabling system with AVB.

In those situations where different latency to different receivers could be an issue (arrays where varying latency would change phase interactions for instance) AVB would be preferred if directly feeding multiple amps, etc. 

You could always feed analogue or AES to those devices as well so there are other ways to get around the changing latency creating a problem.

Lee

[Brian Bolly]

But you are right, the lack of redundancy is a HUGE drawback to AVB. Also, the lack of being able to use off the shelf networking products is another HUGE drawback.

Woah, hold up.  You absolutely can do a redundant network with AVB/MILAN.

And as far as network switches, Cisco, Luminex and Extreme Networks are the ones that I'm familiar with that have AVB compliant products.  There may be others but I haven't looked in a while.  At one time you had to add on a license to the Extreme switches (may still?  it's been a couple years), but I believe the Luminex are off the shelf compliant.  So no, no Office Depot level switches, but certainly accessible products in terms of networking, and definitely nothing "custom".

[Pete Erskine]

Woah, hold up.  You absolutely can do a redundant network with AVB/MILAN.

SIDE BY SIDE REDUNDANT AVB NETWORK
https://www.l-acoustics.com/en/hotnews/l-acoustics-launches-avnu-certified-ls10-avb-switch/

[Andrew Broughton]

Woah, hold up.  You absolutely can do a redundant network with AVB/MILAN.

I wasn't aware that there was redundancy possible with AVB, thank you for clarifying.
I'm interested to know whether L'Acoustics MILAN system can be set up to be redundant, i.e. can their Amps and processors be set up to use redundant AVB cabling?

The AVB literature tout's prioritized transport (something Dante can do as well) and sub-microsecond clocking, but the standard latency seems to be about 2ms. At least Dante can get it down sub-1ms...

And as far as network switches, Cisco, Luminex and Extreme Networks are the ones that I'm familiar with that have AVB compliant products.  There may be others but I haven't looked in a while.  At one time you had to add on a license to the Extreme switches (may still?  it's been a couple years), but I believe the Luminex are off the shelf compliant.  So no, no Office Depot level switches, but certainly accessible products in terms of networking, and definitely nothing "custom".

Yeah, I don't care that much about the additional cost of AVB switches. Decent Dante switches (like the Yamaha) cost too. I think the MOTU AVB switch is probably still the cheapest.

Still not grokking the attraction to AVB for these manufacturers. I will dig in further and speak to them if I can get through to someone in the know at these companies, but so far just seeing what y'all knew about it...

[Andrew Broughton]

Is there an AVB virtual sound card? DVS is big plus for Dante. I know Macs have AVB compliant Ethernet hardware.
Is there a Yamaha AVB MY-card or a Dante -> AVB conversion box?

[ProSoundWeb Community]