Photo courtesy of PreSonus
The music director and tech staff of First Baptist church celebrated the Thursday arrival of their new digital mixer, which they quickly wired into the system to replace an aging analog board. Three audio adapters and a short training session later, the church pressed the mixer into service Sunday morning. This new chapter of moving faders, scene presets, and mixing from a tablet is where their digital audio story started—and ended.
One of the greatest benefits of a digital audio network is that it is “device agnostic.” Any device can perform any audio function: generate, mix, record, route.
Sound familiar? Too many churches have purchased a digital mixer but never truly embraced the tremendous benefits of digital audio networking. In the analog world, where First Baptist church is still stuck, a cable connects two devices in a one-to-one relationship and carries audio in one direction. On a digital audio network, every device can share audio data with every other device in a one-to-many channel free-for-all. Digital mixers, stage boxes, personal monitor mixers, computers, digital audio recorders, even amplifiers and speakers, can all interact and access the same audio data.
All this adds up to flexibility. You can create virtually any configuration of audio devices, controlling and changing them easily from a computer. You can interconnect dozens of these audio “endpoints” without running bulky, expensive audio cabling. All the data in the digital audio network moves on standard ethernet cabling, which is easy and inexpensive to run.
There’s no question the audio industry is moving in the direction of digital audio networking and interconnectivity. To learn more, CPM talked with three industry representatives about what power and capabilities churches could be enjoying by expanding their digital audio system beyond the mixer.
“If one just has a digital mixer and you’re still using it as if it is an analog mixer in all other respects, then you’re only seeing the advantage in that one spot,” says Audinate Senior Product Marketing Manager Brad Price. “The real advancement comes when the entire system is just purely digital end to end. That’s really what digital audio networking is about. You can set up and change where things go, and how many endpoints you have. The advantage is in the futureproofing of it, and the ability to maintain and extend that system over time. It’s just immensely flexible.”
“The real advancement comes when the entire system is purely digital end to end.” - Brad Price, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Audinate, Portland, OR .
The Audinate Dante network is used in thousands of audio products from nearly 300 manufacturers, either integrated into the design or added as an optional interface card. A competing networking standard, AVB, is used by Meyer Sound, Adamson, AVID, and dozens of others. Audio electronics manufacturer PreSonus is a leading proponent of the AVB standard, although they also offer Dante interfaces in several products. To span the gap between the two standards, PreSonus developed its AVB-D16 AVB-to-Dante bridge.
Whether using the Dante or AVB standard (or both), PreSonus Senior Product Manager Ray Tantzen chimes in on just how far a digital audio network can be taken. “Imagine a scenario where you’ve got a mixer front-of-house, you’ve got a rack mixer on stage in monitor mix mode. It’s being used for inputs as well, maybe mixing for a couple of stage wedges and feeding its inputs out to the front-of-house console. Then you’ve got some ear mixers on stage that are receiving direct feeds as well as some subgroups (drums, backing vocals) from the monitor mixer. Each of those ear mixers can receive a different group of channels from the network.”Tantzen continues, “Then you can have a computer on the network that is hooked up doing playback. You have multitrack playback so you can have your click separate from your cue feed separate from your playback tracks. That computer could be feeding a third mixer on the network that’s also bringing in channels from the monitor mixer, from the stage boxes and from front-of-house. That third mixer is taking everything into a broadcast or streaming mix. Next to that broadcast mixer is a second computer that’s recording a multitrack session for mixdown later. Front-of-house, overflow room, and lobby speakers are on the network, and you just choose what you want to feed to them. This is just one example of how you can grow your system over time.”
One of the greatest benefits of a digital audio network is that it is “device agnostic.” Any device can perform any audio function: generate, mix, record, route. A computer, for example, can function as a playback source, a recorder, or even a mixer. According to PreSonus House of Worship Market Manager Richard Gaspard, many churches have begun using a computer digital audio workstation (DAW) in an unconventional role. “What we’ve found in the COVID world is an advent of using a DAW as a broadcast or streaming mixer with some sort of controller. The computer can also capture a multitrack recording at any time. We even have companies building DAW templates for people to use their computer as a broadcast mixer. We’re seeing that more and more, where people aren’t buying another piece of hardware, for example a mixer. They’re capitalizing on what they already own in a DAW.”The current possibilities for digital media networking are vast, but even more capabilities are coming. “The biggest thing that’s happening for us is the introduction of Dante AV,” says Audinate’s Price, “which makes video as easy to route around as audio. It uses the same software. You just click in Dante controller and say, ‘I want that to show up on that monitor,’ and it does. Having all that integrated with the audio system so that it’s just one switch, one set of network cables, one network you have to deal with makes it so much easier.”
Photo courtesy of AVB.
PreSonus is an active member of the Avnu Alliance of companies dedicated to advancing the AVB standard. “We’re working to further the interoperability standard and certifications for pro audio and pro video over a shared network,” Tantzen says. “Another thing we’re doing, even further out, is experiments into the possibility of wireless AVB. We’re imagining a world where we can utilize the power of WiFi 6, as well as 5G, to be able to deliver wireless audio. We’re not talking wireless like you know today, where you go from a microphone to a receiver, or a transmitter to a belt pack. We’re talking the same one-to-many capabilities. Like your phone on WiFi at home, you’ll turn on your wireless mic and it will be on the audio network. We’ll be able to access the audio coming from all these wireless devices.”If your church owns just one digital mixer, don’t stop there. Explore how digital audio networking can open new avenues of control and flexibility in your worship gatherings, live streams, and recordings. Tantzen summarizes the potential of digital audio networking best: “The world of possibilities is almost limitless.”--BIO--Loren Alldrin is a regular contributor to Church Production Magazine.
