Paul Watson talks to the AVnu Alliance’s Ellen Juhlin about the ongoing development of Audio Video Bridging
AT THIS year’s InfoComm expo, a string of seminars were held at the AVnu Alliance stand in a bid to spread the word about the advantages of the evolving Audio Video Bridging (AVB) technology. With a number of major manufacturers already aboard, how close is the pro-audio world to a true standard? Ellen Juhlin, digital products analyst at Meyer Sound and one of the AVnu Alliance presenters, believes that this open standard can genuinely change AV networking…
What was the AVnu Alliance trying to convey at InfoComm? Ultimately, we were showing that AVB is ready to serve as the new unified network for the AV industry; and being at InfoComm was our way of demonstrating to the world of pro-audio and video that it’s not just ‘a good idea’ anymore. Many companies are developing and shipping products with AVB already implemented, and we were getting that message out to the market.
How is AVB better than the other protocols currently being developed? Well, a lot of current audio networking protocols work around the network instead of with the network, but this is actually changing the network to fix those issues, and that makes it much more efficient for both audio and video. Any proprietary solution can only work within the fairly limited confines Ethernet allows it – AVB is different in the fact that the Ethernet network itself now also protects the audio and video data as well as transports it. The IEEE (‘the world’s largest
professional association for the advancement of technology’) element is crucial too; it’s responsible for completing the AVB standards – it also has a lot of involvement from the people that actually make the network switches. The Alliance’s next step is to complete our
Ellen Juhlin of
Meyer Sound and the AVnu Alliance
certification process, which will happen later this year; we’ve already been working on all of the testing programs with the University of New Hampshire.
Do you think the growing popularity of the Dante protocol will hinder the AVnu Alliance’s progress at all? There are obviously a number of other networking options available, but we’re still steadily growing. We’re also talking to a lot of companies that haven’t yet joined up with the AVnu Alliance, and we’re confident that because there’s a far greater ‘sector awareness’ , as we continue to make headway, more companies will join, and we’ll continue to grow. Also, AVB has proven to be very interesting to customers and manufacturers alike, because the feedback from both has been extremely encouraging.
As the AVnu Alliance fuses so many different manufacturers, many of which are competitors, surely there must be a limit as to how much information each respective member is happy to contribute to the team? One of the great things about the AVnu Alliance is that the members are genuinely interested in creating an interoperable ecosystem of products, and I think everyone recognises that sharing tools and resources will speed up these efforts significantly. So, at AVnu plugfests, we’ve had engineers from competing companies looking at each other’s codes to find out why something isn’t working, as well as sharing techniques, and generally trying to move the state of the technology forward. There’s no advantage to one product getting out first if
there’s nothing that will connect to it. On the other hand, there has been quite a lot of work and discussion focused on defining the line between a baseline functionality that is required for interoperability, and any other value-added features that are the responsibility of the company developing the product. For instance, part of the certification process might involve testing a loudspeaker’s ability to connect to a stream, but it won’t test the audio qualities of the speaker.
With Cisco Systems not yet committing to producing any AVB products, and being such a big player in networking and switching, is there not a possibility that AVB may struggle to get off the ground?
Cisco is an active member in good standing in the AVnu Alliance, but they have chosen to not disclose their product roadmap. Every company determines the best time for them to enter a particular market, and many of the companies within AVnu have publicly committed to getting AVnu-certified products into the market as soon as possible. We have already seen switches
from Netgear and LabX, as well as a family of AVB-enabled switches from Extreme Networks. These switches allow early adopters to deploy AVB systems, and the success we’ve seen with these projects will only drive more demand for AVB products.n www.avnu.orgwww.meyersound.com
Teenyweeny monitors. Live.
The E6 loudspeaker is no bigger than a fine bottle of wine. A miniature, yet incorporating a monitor angle. Designed for mobile reinforcement on stage and in changing production environments. While it sounds distinctively bigger than it is, it remains neutral, clear, transparent and intelligible even at high sound pressure levels. As with all the little systems in the d&b E-Series.