Laugh, but this probably does have some real world applications for Live Audio.
Digital Live audio mixing is taking over, but it suffers one flaw compared to analog: Latency. Humans can adjust pretty easily to performing an action and hearing a delayed response (that's pretty natural in our daily lives, basically think of it as echolocation). This is sort of like standing farther from a guitar amplifier (sound travels roughly 1 ms per foot). However, singers have it the worst: there is 0 latency from their voice to the ear canal, so monitor systems try to use analog as much as possible.
For digital audio links, every time you join then end-to-end or decode them, you get a bit of latency added.
There are a few audio interconnects that run on Ethernet's OSI Layer 0 (physical medium)
* AES50 is standardized, basically you can think of it as the 100Base-T of digital live audio. It's synchronously clocked with a predictable latency; with roughly ~62us per link. Pretty nice. Cat5e cables are dirt cheap and musicians are destructive as feral cats, so it it's a pretty good solution. Max length is 100meters.
* AudioDante is also popular but actually relies on IP Layer 3, so latency is variable. Typical values are 1ms - 10ms. Max length is pretty much unlimited, with a lot of asterisks.
FTA: 11us is _unbelievably good_ digital latency, but with near unlimited length is actually a pretty good value proposition for Live Audio. There may be a niche demand for a product like this: slap in some SFP adapters, transmit a channel of digital audio over whatever medium you like.
Digital Live audio mixing is taking over, but it suffers one flaw compared to analog: Latency. Humans can adjust pretty easily to performing an action and hearing a delayed response (that's pretty natural in our daily lives, basically think of it as echolocation). This is sort of like standing farther from a guitar amplifier (sound travels roughly 1 ms per foot). However, singers have it the worst: there is 0 latency from their voice to the ear canal, so monitor systems try to use analog as much as possible.
For digital audio links, every time you join then end-to-end or decode them, you get a bit of latency added.
There are a few audio interconnects that run on Ethernet's OSI Layer 0 (physical medium)
* AES50 is standardized, basically you can think of it as the 100Base-T of digital live audio. It's synchronously clocked with a predictable latency; with roughly ~62us per link. Pretty nice. Cat5e cables are dirt cheap and musicians are destructive as feral cats, so it it's a pretty good solution. Max length is 100meters.
* AudioDante is also popular but actually relies on IP Layer 3, so latency is variable. Typical values are 1ms - 10ms. Max length is pretty much unlimited, with a lot of asterisks.
FTA: 11us is _unbelievably good_ digital latency, but with near unlimited length is actually a pretty good value proposition for Live Audio. There may be a niche demand for a product like this: slap in some SFP adapters, transmit a channel of digital audio over whatever medium you like.