#163

To reply to your question specifically about AVB: not sure. Presonus’ live desks which utilize AVB are apparently quite popular, however it’s still likely a niche market. Remote mixing using MOTU is also a possibility - iPad interfaces to racked AVB equipped MOTU interfaces would easily replace a mixing desk, and it looks like MOTU are angling in that direction.

It’s certainly a cinch for you to bring your own second AVB unit, set up prerouting, plop it at the desk, and use the analogue or ADAT outs to the FOH board if they’re still in the analogue domain, and then mix from an iPad or laptop. If you integrate your monitoring into another unit or utilize the analogue outs on the stage-side box, you’d have a pretty complete setup, right there.

#164

Yes my question was also more clearly pointing at the “standards” issue, it’s kind of a bummer to come somewhere with an all prepared AVB solution only to end up with a MADI or Dante system, so I was curious as to wether or not there was already an industry standard. Also nice to hear digital snakes and Ethernet are a thing at bigger venues (my question was mostly pointed at those venues, like, not thousands of people or big festivals but something aroung 1.5k venues). I’ll have to investigate with sound engineers around to kind of find out if any standard use is emerging and what would be the best “setup to rule them all”.

I’d love to go the AVB route to sort an awful lot of live routing problems though.

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#165

I believe the new MOTU AVB and mk4 interfaces use Sabre converters so I would be very surprised if there was a material difference in sound quality with their newest products. Preamps are probably a different story but the converters themselves should be top notch.

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#166

I’ve noticed the trend towards digital mixing/digital snakes around my area too. Most of the clubs (that aren’t the like, DIY PA type) seem to be switching from big, old analog consoles to the flashy Midas M32-or similar digital ones. I was talking to my friend who does equipment rental for fests and stuff about the digital snake (I was curious about latency), and apparently the latency is less over AVB than analog for long cable runs (but not that long, can’t remember the exact length they switch)

The other thing these consoles provide is various forms of direct recording (I believe the M32 can record a stereo master sum to usb and potentially individual tracks via SD card in the back?). The potential there for live recordings is pretty neat.

EDIT: note not actually sure the protocol the m32 uses over Ethernet is avb or something else

#167

The latency should be identical in terms of wire speed (electrical impulses travel at the speed of light) so the buffering / etc of AVB adds a small delay, but it’s fairly negligible.

He may be comparing the latency of AVB systems to the latency of legacy digital consoles, but wire length should have absolutely nothing to do with it.

That said, the X32 and other Behringer products are reported to use the point-to-point (non-routable, non-switchable) AES50 protocol, and since Behringer owns Midas I’d assume the M32 uses the same, but I haven’t kept up with what they’re doing as a manufacturer or if they’ve changed to one of the more modern switchable protocols.

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#168

Signals travel much faster via fiber optic cable vs copper cable and neither are actually at the speed of light.

#169

Oh god, when I wrote that I knew somebody would get pedantic about it. Yes, it’s the speed of light “in the medium”, aka the “wave propagation speed”, aka 1/sqrt(epsilon*mu) and is relative to permittivity of the medium.

Since we’re talking Ethernet versus analogue here, we’re firmly in the realm of “copper” - nobody’s using fiber for this stuff except the MADI folk, as far as I’m aware (though there ARE other fibre-based audio transports - I’m talking specifically common-use live-sound tech and focused mostly on Ethernet-utilizing tech here anyway).

Anyways, the point remains: the latency of AVB / AES50 / AES68 / Dante / etc. is the sum of the A/D latency, the transport buffering, the wire speed of the signal, the receive end buffering, the internal summing/routing, etc… And the latency of analogue mixing is simply the wire speed of the signal through the chain (yes, if we want to be super crazy we can count phase shift through the EQs and other stuff, but that exists on the digital level too). Therefore it’s impossible that, compared to analogue mixing, any digital (copper-based) transport can have lower latency, it could be theoretically equal, but never lower.

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#170

No worries. I thought it should be mentioned since there are probably people here who do not have electrical engineering or telecommunications backgrounds that could read that as a fact.

It probably does not matter a whole lot in comparison to the other places where a bottleneck could happen.

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#171

Appreciate the further explanation and the clarification—I definitely am not well versed in any of this stuff. It’s interesting to learn more.

#172

Yep, Midas uses AES50, although that predates the Behringer acquisition.

AFAIK optical is fairly common, as it allows for longer distances than copper

#173

Yes, in stadium installs and very large venues especially, but those are usually proprietary protocols (not based on Ethernet), or, as mentioned before, MADI, which is increasingly becoming popular for optical audio hauls. I’d be interested if people are actually taking standard Ethernet-based audio protocols and running them over optical Ethernet in these cases as I’m not aware of any non-proprietary vendors providing optical taps on their gear for that purpose, so you’d need some audio-aware gear on the level of Cisco equipment to handle that for you. That’s a space I don’t tend to play in though since it’s pretty unique to those massive install needs. If anybody here works in that field I’d be interested to hear what’s common equipment there and if there are any standards that could be leveraged at smaller (band-scale or project/local studio/touring rig scale) that would take any real advantage of optical.

Having done some fiber based networking for very large datacentres, my experience with optical is that it’s very delicate, rather expensive, and isn’t intended for frequent connection/disconnection. Copper is much more robust, durable, and better designed for rapidly changed/reconfigured situations.

But we’re straying away from the topic here so if people want to split conversations about very long haul audio / venue installations away I’d be ok with it.

#174

I know Klark Teknik make several AES50 extenders that support optical fiber, but they’re meant for 100m+ cable runs, so not relevant for the smaller scales we’re discussing here…

#175

AES50 is kind of an odd duck, too. It’s only point-to-point and pretty much only useful for digital “snakes”. Not much utility in that protocol for the sorts of applications we’re talking about (device aggregation, flexible routing with multiple destinations - foldback and FOH and recording, for instance, and computer/interface/mixer integration). So I really don’t count it as relevant for this discussion anyway, since we started by looking at AVB and similarly capable interfaces. The whole discussion about optical was really just to ensure that people weren’t confused by my unqualified speed of light comment, and I think is really a side-track from the point, which I understand to be: do AVB and similar technologies have a real utility for a small band, independent touring setup, or project studio?

I think yes, in qualified situations, moreso as the industry standardizes, and in the future stringing together some of today’s AVB gear into a very capable large multi-channel physical-mixer-and-computer integrated system without tons of cables everywhere will be quite affordable as the industry moves on. So I think there is some value to it now, but even bigger value for those who don’t mind slightly vintage equipment, now that most affordable “pro-sumer” grade equipment are well beyond “good enough” and into “last decade’s ultra-high-end” by now. Dante is still too expensive for the average home studio, and AES67 hasn’t really taken off (or even been finalized? not keeping up) from my recent-ish survey of equipment out there. I do personally think gigabit ethernet is a very good choice for low-latency routable audio transport and I really hope we start to see a real, affordable standard emerging here soon that replaces ADAT for multi-channel interconnects.

#176

I seriously considered using AVB or Dante for my last studio upgrade, but I ended up with a good deal on a MOTU 828x, which given it’s 2 sets of ADAT I/O gives me more than enough options for what I currently need. If I had a slightly bigger studio I probably would have gone for it though.

I had looked at Dante at the time and also decided it was too expensive, but there are more and more products that support it coming out and it seems that’s changing. The recent Tascam interfaces are quite affordable.

#177

Hi there,
For many years I used scarlett 2i2 and now it finally stop working.
I’m looking for a high quality audio interface to replace it.
It is need to be an usb and at least 6 inputs and outputs.
For the moment I’m thinking between the RME uc or Motu ultralite AVB or ultralite mk4.

The hardware I mainly use is Soundcraft mk4 mixer, macbook pro and eurorack synthesizer.

on paper I see that in generally people are recommending more the rme over the motu, but is it worth the extra money ?

What are your recommends ?

Many thank!

2 Likes
#178

Whether the RME is worth the money over the MOTU comes down to a few things:

  1. Whether MOTU’s mixing setup works well for you or you want more standalone control (via external MIDI or OSC) of the unit’s internal mixing/routing. TotalMix is pretty impressive, but MOTU’s software has improved leaps and bounds recently.
  2. Whether the extra quality of the RME microphone preamplifiers matters to you or not (MOTUs are very good, RME are world class) - note I’m talking about the analogue preamplifiers - both the RME and the most recent MOTUs will do a very very good job of digitizing the resulting signal.
  3. Whether the metal cases and long-term reliability and support that RME provide give you the sense of confidence you want compared to MOTU’s plastic cases and more forum-oriented support, and
  4. Whether or not you really need DC coupled I/O (the MOTU has all ports DC coupled, the RME only has the headphone jack outputs 7/8 coupled).

IMO, if you buy the RME used at a good price in a good condition, it’s probably worth the small bit extra you’d pay over a new MOTU. Whether or not it’s worth it under other conditions really depends on the feature set, the actual prices you’d pay, and your responses to the above major differences, and in most cases for your setup it sounds like the MOTU (or, honestly, even one of the MkII Focusrites) will suit you just fine.

The main thing I get from your setup is if you want to interface to the eurorack via CV (using something like Bitwig or Ableton Live’s CV Tools), in which case the DC coupling on the MOTU is a big advantage.

2 Likes
#179

id be interested to see what you all think of the metric halo 3d card

#180

Thanks!
At the end I went with Motu UL MK4 and couldn’t be more happy :slight_smile:

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#181

Hi folks :wave:

Planning some trips this summer, and now that we have a little one and the accumulation of stuff that comes with having a little one while traveling, my travel music setup needs to be quite small.

Does anyone have any travel-friendly audio interfaces that they’d recommend?

I have a slightly complicated (at least, in my experience) signal path I’d like to support: computer will be making sounds, routing out through the interface to a norns, then back into the computer via the interface. I think this means that I need a 2 in / 4 out interface, assuming that the main would be not be sufficient for sending non-master sound out of the interface, assuming I want also to listen to master via the interface (say, on headphones).

Anyway, any thoughts throw em my way, I’d appreciate it.

#182

Apogee duet or RME baby face seem tailor made to this. Babyface is nice because of the ADAT expansion capability and very clever on-board routing / mixing also.

For cheaper options an iConnectivity Audio4+ will do some very neat tricks as well especially with its clever MIDI routing. And don’t overlook a Focusrite 2i4 or 6i6 mkII either. I usually recommend more I/O than you think you need but don’t go overboard with it. It’s nice to be able to fit that unexpected extra artist or collaboration into your kit from time to time though.

If you NEED CV integration and not just audio to your Norns or a modular though, take a close look at the MOTU line which are DC coupled and can integrate beautifully with your modular and Ableton Live CV tools or other DAW/CV software.