Media Networking Alliance Presents Live AES67 Demonstration

	MNA technical working group chairman, Kevin Gross

The Media Networking Alliance (MNA) -- the professional AV industry alliance established to promote awareness and uptake of AES67 -- is exhibiting at the forthcoming 139th AES International Convention in New York, October 29 - November 1, in booth 344. A major attraction on the alliance's booth will be a live demonstration of audio networking interoperability, featuring 22 currently available networked-audio devices, from different manufacturers employing various audio network platforms.

AES67-specific extensions to the different network platforms provide for the common interchange of digital audio between them. In the instance of the demo, digital audio signals will be interoperable between devices employing Dante, Livewire, Q-LAN, and Ravenna. A total of 22 devices, from ALC NetworX, Archwave AG, Axia Audio, Digigram, DirectOut, Focusrite, Genelec, Lawo, Merging Technologies, QSC, Solid State Logic, Telos Systems Inc., and Yamaha, are connected to a simple network with a single Ethernet switch. AES67 supports both unicast (one-to-one) and multicast (one-to-many) audio transmission; this will be primarily a multicast demonstration, along the lines of the PlugFest testing carried out by the AES, in cooperation with the European Broadcast Union (EBU) at the Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT) in Munich, Germany, last year.

Speaking for the MNA, technical working group chairman, Kevin Gross said: "Although pairs of manufacturers have independently verified interoperability and large-scale multi-manufacturer testing was done a year ago at the PlugFest in Munich, this will be the first significant public demonstration of AES67 interoperability. It's powerful to see AES67 fulfilling its promise making network audio connections between devices and protocols that were formerly incompatible."

"In addition to audio transport we will be demonstrating some of the manufacturer-specific discovery, control, and monitoring functions that augment AES67 audio interoperability and coexist on the same network."

AES67 enables high-performance audio-over-IP streaming interoperability between the various currently available IP-based audio networking platforms. AES67 operates over standard layer 3 Ethernet networks and, as such, is routable and fully scalable, like any common modern IT network. As a rule of thumb, any network infrastructure capable of handling VoIP should be able to handle AES67.

AES67-2015 - http://www.aes.org/publications/standards/search.cfm?docID=96

AES-R12-2014, "Standards project report - AES67 Interoperability PlugFest - Munich 2014" Audio Engineering Society, New York, New York, US. Http://www.aes.org/publications/standards/search.cfm?docID=98