fast-changing technology’ Nicola Beretta, Allen & Heath
benefits, Beretta confirms that “routing and distribution in a large facility can be a clumsy and expensive undertaking when compared to Cat5 and its siblings”. Also, while MADI can
accommodate a limited amount of control data, it may not be sufficient for applications where increasingly large amounts of such information need to be
Point-to-Point: As talk turns to full networking as a default, there is the simple fact that MADI is “intrinsically point-to-point”, says Beretta. “It connects a source and a destination – it is not a networking protocol, which is where audio-over- Ethernet clearly wins.”
FAR FROM THE MADI CROWD? Most observers expect MADI to remain in demand for a long time to come – particularly in broadcast, where it is “truly embedded”, notes Ferriday. But increasingly, it will probably be used in tandem with other approaches. James Gordon, managing
director of DiGiCo, one of MADI’s earliest adopters, observes that it remains “very useful, but with the demands of today you need a large backbone behind it. You can look at network- based systems, but these tend to suffer from latency and cable-length limitations unless you go optical. Then you have security issues, so the network tends to be
MERCURY BRINGS MADI TO CAMBRIDGE COMMUNITY CHURCH
Broadcast is the sector in which MADI is most firmly entrenched – but it remains popular in many other areas of install, too, including houses of worship. A recent installation at Cambridge Community Church that entailed Mercury AV supplying an Allen & Heath iLive-T digital mixing system to manage FOH and monitor sound is a case-in-point. MADI is at the core of the
infrastructure, providing a 64- channel bidirectional audio link between iLive systems at FOH and monitors – specifically, an iDR-48 MixRack and iLive-T112 control surface at monitors, with an iDR-16 MixRack and a
dedicated as well. On that basis we went for a dedicated optical network that was developed for audio. The Optocore system [which is a synchronous, redundant, optical ring network capable of transporting audio, video, data and word clock over long distances] has worked well for us and offers an
second iLive-T112 surface at FOH.
“In a standard system, we could have simply put the MixRacks on the stage and used Cat5 cable to link to the control surface at FOH via ACE,” said Ian McDonald, director of Mercury AV. “However, the church needed a more complex set-up involving a digital mic split to enable the mics to be routed to both FOH and a separate monitor mixer. The network option card slots in the MixRacks enable this to be done easily and cheaply using two Allen & Heath MADI cards and some standard BNC cable.”
unrivalled latency and redundancy.” For DiGiCo, implementing Optocore has taken its systems into the realm of “a large network with 512 channels at 96kHz and five consoles sharing 14 racks of I/O... and still with the option to outbreak onto MADI”. Also posing a challenge to MADI’s present standing is
Ian MacDonald from Mercury AV (left) and Rich Harris from Cambridge Community Church with the facility's new iLive digital mixing system
the groundswell of support for audio-over-IP. As distribution and control requirements become more demanding, the requirement for a proper network solution is certain to grow. And for many observers, this can best be implemented by using existing IP infrastructures, thereby minimising labour- and cost-