Audio over IP Studios – Technology still using old thinking?
During work experience, I was able to get very familiar with the Axia Audio-over-IP Studios. From my knowledge, there aren’t any that many stations using Axia studios, and I don’t even remember seeing them at SMPTE09, so their choice to invest in this brand was interesting to me.
However, there was a very valid reason they chose this brand over, say, Logiteck or Klotz. With either of these alternate brands (and others, I believe), the audio is all connect directly into the studio engines via I/O cards.
What happens if you have an audio source which needs to be used in multiple studios? You can access the audio over the network no matter what studio it is connected into, but if the studio with the audio for that feed connected into it needs to be brought offline, or perhaps restarted, you loose access to that source.
How do these companies suggest you get around this issue? Distribution amplifiers – run the audio into each studio’s engine through a DA. Hang on! Isn’t the point of Audio-over-IP equipment to avoid all of that thick multi-pair cable which is so expensive and takes extra time to install?
Let’s take a look at how Axia does it: no audio is actually connected into the studio engine. It all is connected into Audio Nodes, which are basically a 1RU device which hooks into your audio network via a single run of Cat6, and has some analog inputs and outputs on the back. All of that audio is now available on the network, to be accessed wherever you desire.
The end result: if you need to turn off a whole studio, you don’t risk taking any station-wide audio off the network. You also don’t need any multi pair cable into each studio, and DAs.
The problem I think the other manufacturers are facing is old thinking. (Actually, this is what the technical manager at Hope 103.2 described it as – and I agree with him). They are using the old methodology of all audio being connected into the studio, rather than having it connected into anywhere on the network. I can’t blame them for thinking like this – studios have been doing this for years, why change it for digital, right?
Why would you want to stick with this old approach when it’s obvious that this node approach of Axia’s is better thinking? By the way, it’s not as if Axia came up with this approach – computer networks have been doing this for ages.
Let’s move forwards and adapt new ways of thinking. Let’s be agents of change.
(I don’t mean to bag out Logiteck or Klotz. I spoke to both of them at SMPTE09, and they are great people. However, I believe that perhaps they are using the wrong techniques for this digital studio revolution.)