bitofagiggle Posted March 7, 2014 Share Posted March 7, 2014 So somehow I've only today become aware that there is a protocal called Multichannel Audio Digital Interface and that it, in fact, isn't someone making a typo whilst writing MIDI. As I always do when I discover new technologies or techniques in the sound world I'm probably going to relentlessly rake every forum dry and watch hours of youtube videos until I know as much as the internet can tell me about it, but until I do that; anyone fancy giving me the low down? What's the basics of it? What sort of applications is it used for? Where am I likely to encounter it? I know some digital boards have MADI outputs, I can imagine it being used in someway with digital snakes or link from the Monitor board the the FOH board? Any help for your resident rookie would be much appreciated! Cheers :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeilW Posted March 7, 2014 Share Posted March 7, 2014 Here is a good starting point for your research, RME who make a whole range of MADI interfaces and tools have a MADI info center, with some example set ups as well. http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_madi_center.php?page=content/products/en_products_madi_center Many digital console manufacturers utilise MADI for their multicore systems, probably most notably Digico and Soundcraft. At it's most basic level, a single MADI stream allows the transfer of 64 channels of 48kHz digital audio over either coax or fiber. It is commonly used to as a digital multicore and as an interface for recording and playback. Cheers, Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Posted March 7, 2014 Share Posted March 7, 2014 ...new technologies...Where have you been for the last 20 years? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitofagiggle Posted March 7, 2014 Author Share Posted March 7, 2014 Here is a good starting point for your research, RME who make a whole range of MADI interfaces and tools have a MADI info center, with some example set ups as well. http://www.rme-audio...cts_madi_center Many digital console manufacturers utilise MADI for their multicore systems, probably most notably Digico and Soundcraft. At it's most basic level, a single MADI stream allows the transfer of 64 channels of 48kHz digital audio over either coax or fiber. It is commonly used to as a digital multicore and as an interface for recording and playback. Cheers, Neil Cheers for that Neil! Was good to have a look at some of the products available. ...new technologies...Where have you been for the last 20 years? To be read "technologies which are new to me" I've always been aware that digital snakes exist, but not how they work, how they're integrated into systems and the name of the protocol they use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulears Posted March 7, 2014 Share Posted March 7, 2014 Lots of kit has an option for it, but I've never seen the need. I've just got it tucked in my head that it's just a handy send it down a fibre 32/32 device that I could use, but don't. It's an option card on my mixer, but as firewwire and USB 2 work for me - there's no advantage, and the cable to the stage box is a CAT5 already, so not much interest to me really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Dave Posted March 8, 2014 Share Posted March 8, 2014 One of the best things about MADI is it is an open AES standard (AES10) so any manufacturer can integrate it into their products without paying license fees. IIRC It was originally designed as transport for early digital tape machines. 64 channels of audio (32 at 96K) using off the shelf BNC cable which enables any audio device to interface to any other audio device upto 100m away. If only more things worked that way! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueShift Posted March 9, 2014 Share Posted March 9, 2014 ...If only more things worked that way! They do. The entire broadcast audio world runs on MADI. Its only us silly live people who insist on creating new standards every few months instead of adopting tried & tested standards that have been around for 20 years... MADI is here to stay folks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Electrolytic Posted March 9, 2014 Share Posted March 9, 2014 Its only us silly live people who insist on creating new standards every few months instead of adopting tried & tested standards that have been around for 20 years... to be fair its the manufactures trying to lock us into their standard thus ensuring we purchase further into their product line. I'm sure there is a marketing term for it.either way its a capitalist attitude on their part. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smalljoshua Posted March 10, 2014 Share Posted March 10, 2014 I do find it weird that multiple companies are indeed adopting a universal interface for Digital Audio, but it is less than open. Whilst there are both AES10 (MADI) and AES50 as open standards, Dante is being chosen for the seeming universal choice at the moment. Whilst it has obvious advantages over either AES standard (being a Layer 3 protocol with all the benefits that gives) I still would rather have a nice open standard. Josh Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chelgrian Posted March 10, 2014 Share Posted March 10, 2014 I do find it weird that multiple companies are indeed adopting a universal interface for Digital Audio, but it is less than open. Whilst there are both AES10 (MADI) and AES50 as open standards, Dante is being chosen for the seeming universal choice at the moment. Whilst it has obvious advantages over either AES standard (being a Layer 3 protocol with all the benefits that gives) I still would rather have a nice open standard. I'm not sure I see the advantages of Audio over IP at all. In simple systems without switches Dante introduces an extra layer of complication and, because it requires Gigabit Ethernet, has more stringent requirements on cables in order to get anywhere near the theoretical 100m limit. MADI just plugs in and works and has less fussy requirements on coax for reaching he same distances. In more complicated systems I need to spend quite a lot on reliable high performance switches, Audinate or their licensees don't appear to test and qualify switches so you are left entirely on your own. Having seen even expensive and supposedly bulletproof switches crash even with such switches I wouldn't be happy to have Dante share the same physical network infrastructure as say non-mission critical audio stuff like radio mic monitoring and desk control and I also would not want to share it with the Art-Net or proprietary equivalents that the lampies will want. It's also certainly not going to share with general purpose network infrastructure. I think the reason that both MADI for audio and SDI for video are ubiquitous in the broadcast world is simply because they are both designed to run across high quality coax of which broadcast houses have lots plumbed in to their buildings. So new standards were designed which put more down the existing installed wiring. I don't think Dante is ubiquitous. Yamaha use Dante but DiGiCo use MADI, Midas use AES50 and the new SSL Live also uses MADI. The higher end Soundcrafts use MADI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueShift Posted March 10, 2014 Share Posted March 10, 2014 I'm not sure I see the advantages of Audio over IP at all. In simple systems without switches Dante introduces an extra layer of complication...In simple stage to FOH systems, I completely agree. MADI (AES10) and what we would call AES (AES3) are as simple as it gets. serial data streams, no buffering, no switching, no packetising. Lovely.However, when you get to larger systems where you need to distribute and route audio all over the place, IP networks get much more interesting, because they support a variety of network layouts and allow for complex routing. Dante is also more fault tolerant than MADI. Partly because devices with Primary and Secondary connections offer complete redundancy (without any failover circuitry) of the audio stream, but also because the de-centralised routing means you can lose individual devices, and not affect the whole network. With MADI, you need redundancy in your router, otherwise you lose everything....In more complicated systems I need to spend quite a lot on reliable high performance switches, Audinate or their licensees don't appear to test and qualify switches so you are left entirely on your own...Yes and No. The cost of quality switches is still vastly less than the cost of a MADI or AES50 router. And while Audinate do not qualify switches, they do tell you exactly how their protocol works, and what network technologies it leverages. So if you have a good grasp of networking (which you really need to embark on a complex dante project) than you can very simply implement a high performance Dante environment. Check out the Audinate youtube page....I think the reason that both MADI for audio and SDI for video are ubiquitous in the broadcast world is simply because they are both designed to run across high quality coax of which broadcast houses have lots plumbed in to their buildings...I'm sure when MADI was developed, the desire for common cable standards was a factor, for sure. However, broadcasters already have to have large routers for distributing video signals, so having a similarly routable audio protocol is also desirable....I don't think Dante is ubiquitous...It isn't, but AVB will be the media technology that wins the format war, and since Dante is forward compatible with that, its a smart choice to back! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Audinate EU Tech Posted March 10, 2014 Share Posted March 10, 2014 I'm quite obviously biased- but I think it fair to give some insight into this from my perspective: "Audinate or their partners don't qualify switches" - There is a really good reason for this- Audinate or their partners don't make the switches. "This leaves you completely on your own" - Not at all. Whilst we don't qualify switches If you look around even this forum you will see posts that I have made helping people understand this. I won't qualify a switch for you, because that would be suicidally stupid, and inherently misleading. I will however happily talk (at too much some would say) length about what experiences I have had putting together some of the largest productions and installations in the world both in my previous job as a Dante user, and in my current job for Audinate- you are far from alone. A case in point is a switch that has, since a firmware update to a particular feature become slightly more complicated to operate in the way that people in AV would expect. I am sure that everyone here can see the lack of appetite to say "this one is good" for a product that one has no control over, and then be hauled over the coals for not spotting every minutiae of a firmware update. If you however engage in discussion with me, I might even take an interest in your system as a whole, rather than just giving you some "to the exclusion of everything else" advice... "A nice open standard" - Audinate also announced support for AES67 as well as the already widely publicised AVB. Wrapping this stuff up into a product, takes many person years of development, unfortunately our bank managers still want us to pay for our homes at the end of the month, so we cant do this for free... incidentally I am writing this post on a closed operating system where the OS vendor also sold me the hardware. They (like us) have employed a lot of open source code, mixed in with their own special sauce to deliver me this rather nice product. I don't have a problem buying this, even in the case that I could make a pretty educated assessment at how much it actually cost to make (physically) against how much I paid. I could not guess how many thousands of development years went into this, and how unimaginably more expensive the software was than the hardware, the continued support, and the paying people to answer questions also has a large cost. If you want to know more about Dante, and if you have specific questions about installing complex - mixed traffic systems (which are actually quite common in the corporate world) please let me know- we should start another thread as I do not want to hijack the conversation about MADI (something I have rather a lot of experience with as well, and am in no mood to start debating - mainly because I am more concerned with the application of technology, and helping people get good results... I think everyone is smart enough to find the correct technology for their particular application - the smartest people ask the most questions.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chelgrian Posted March 10, 2014 Share Posted March 10, 2014 I'm quite obviously biased- but I think it fair to give some insight into this from my perspective: "Audinate or their partners don't qualify switches" - There is a really good reason for this- Audinate or their partners don't make the switches. That doesn't stop you having a qualification program, even a self certified one would do. I know what the requirements for Dante are however just to take the example of the required number of packets per second that can be forwarded between ports. It's damn near impossible to find this information for cheap switches and once you get up to switches which do have this kind of information and guarantees available you are getting in to things from companies such as Extreme and Arista or real Cisco gear which are utterly overkill in terms of numbers of ports and other features and cost a significant fraction of the cost of the desk itself. "This leaves you completely on your own" Yes it does because I have to recommend and choose the switch to the people holding the purse strings and if it doesn't work it's me who has to explain why I've wasted their money and 'someone on an internet forum gave me some advice' will not cut it as an excuse. For example if Yamaha re-badged a switch from someone else and qualified it to work with the CL series then people would buy it even if they doubled the price from whatever it was underneath simply because of the knowledge that they had tested a combination of hardware and firmware versions and there was a a reasonable confidence everything would work. In fact Yamaha do seem to have some advice but it's not on their website if you Google you find: https://www.scenutrustning.se/dokument/Advice%20for%20Dante%20Switches%20and%20Cables.pdf which seems to hail from Yamaha CASC. You'll see that from the small sample they tested they two closely related switches from the same manufacturer one was fine and once had unacceptable amounts of jitter. Without a qualification program or anyone actually testing such things it is impossible for me to know if a particular switch or combination of switch and firmware is suitable. If you want to know more about Dante, and if you have specific questions about installing complex - mixed traffic systems (which are actually quite common in the corporate world) In the corporate world the installation contractor would be taking the risk and doing the testing and charging a handsome mark up for the privilege, beyond that the company is probably large enough to do the required testing in house without noticing the people and equipment overhead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Audinate EU Tech Posted March 10, 2014 Share Posted March 10, 2014 I'm quite obviously biased- but I think it fair to give some insight into this from my perspective: "Audinate or their partners don't qualify switches" - There is a really good reason for this- Audinate or their I'm really sorry that I have not been clear. Anyone is welcome to access the support structures in place for Dante. This exists - and the offer of support IS real. Therefore any lone behaviour is by choice. Allow me to spell out how you get the safety and peace of mind many others have benefited from - This is not explicitly stated anywhere... So confusion is understandable. Dante is a technology supplied to equipment manufacturers. As part of the product development cycle Audinate often will provide training to the support organisations of our partners. It is not practical to expect the support organisation of manufacturer a to be intimate with a product from manufacturer B. If you called the support organisation of one of our partners, and a question arises about either a specific network question or another manufacturers product, they will call Audinate support who will advise directly, make contact with a product specialist from other concerned manufacturers... So if you have an issue we all very quickly can support you. it is of course better to catch things up front. From time to time we run training days where anyone is welcome to attend and ask whatever they like. If you post questions up front about a specific design idea I will personally try to get the equipment and product specialists in the room - we have done this, and have had nearly 200 attendees to these days (we even bought lunch) We cant let you know if you don't tell us you want to take advantage of this opportunity - we send invitations out from our mailing list, and the only filter is regional - on an EMEA/ Americas / APAC basis. If we are too far away... Send us an email, help us put together a reasonable sized group, and we'll certainly look at how to accommodate this. And as for concerns about clients- we have bought them lunch too. I hope this clears that up Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.