[bsder]

> But isn't this dead before it really lifts off?

No, because automotive is the use case driving this and consumer/professional audio will come along for the ride. Think about how you synchronize the LCDs and speakers in an SUV--Ethernet is way easier than just about any other solution.

The biggest obstacle to adoption in the consumer/prosumer space is the fact that everybody killed Ethernet ports on their laptops.

[qppo]

What? I've been going to AES67 meetings and talks for several years and worked on AoIP products, I don't think I've ever met someone from the automotive industry or heard they used the protocols that AES67 is going to supplant/integrate with (Dante, Ravenna, etc). The standards committees members were professional and commercial audio manufacturers.

This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your speakers, it's how you rig up the audio system at a theme park or network the audio feeds for all the broadcasters at a World Cup match. Those are two applications that AES67 committee members had worked on and where it will probably be deployed.

[bsder]

I was being kind and lumping AES67 in with TSN/AVB (time-sensitive networking/audio-video bridging).

If I'm being snarky, AES67 is a last ditch effort by the proprietary vendors to remain relevant before AVB/TSN wipes them out.

Before Covid, it seemed like Presonus was wiring up every new church I knew of with AVB/TSN.

> This isn't how you connect something trivial like an LCD to your speakers

Automotive companies do not regard that as trivial. Copper is heavy and expensive and difficult to route. LCDs are in the ceiling and speakers are in the floor. The only common point is at the (literal, in this case) firewall.

Collapsing everything to a few pairs of Ethernet is a big deal for them.

[lukeh]

AVB/TSN has a lot of great things about it but it's a market failure outside of proprietary audio systems (e.g. Avid, Presonus) and the automative world. The fact that it requires not just the endpoints (which themselves require an Ethernet chipset with multiple send/receive queues and hardware time stamping) but all network switches to support 802.1AS, MSRP, MVRP, etc creates a stalemate between vendors (waiting for a deployed base) and customers (waiting for market availability).

My personal opinion is that AES67 will eventually win. Dante has the installed base for now, and it can operate in an AES67 interoperability mode (albeit with quite a few limitations). SMPTE 2110-30 is essentially AES67. AES/TSN will limp along within homogeneous networks with Dante/AES67 at the edges where interoperability is required.

Don't get me wrong, I like AVB (see other post about AES67/AVB bridge), even though it has some quirks, e.g. the relationship between PTP and media clocks is a lot more straightforward in AES67.

[detaro]

Re automotive audio and Ethernet, AVB is kind of a thing in automotive, or at least some vendors try to make it one.

[aidenn0]

What's the advantage to this versus a more traditional PA system? Just fewer wires to run?

[qppo]

The big win is distributed audio networks. For example an esports match might have play-by-play and commentary in 20 languages, in traditional sportscasting they fly those folks out on location. What they do for League of Legends (and a lot of international sportscasting) is use AoIP to send the stream back to their studio, multicast to commentator crews around the world, multicast back to the studio, multiplex into the simulcast, and broadcast out on their streaming platforms. (Also I'm recalling this info from a talk at an AES meeting from about 18 months ago so if anyone from Riot has better intel, please correct me!)

Onsite, it's not feasible to use miles of cable for analog signals (and it is miles, in large venues). Even with balanced connections you start getting noise problems after a few hundred feet. Digital conversion closer to the sources solves this issue, which means those DACs and ADCs need to be networked somehow. Building infrastructure for corporate networks onsite is a mostly solved problem with lots of cheap hardware available, so they just use that and place custom gear with the converters at the input/output locations. Not to mention if lighting is involved, noise can get really quite bad.

It's just all around more modular, cheaper at scale, effective, and foolproof than full analog.

There's also a whole bunch of less sexy use cases in corporate environments where a PA doesn't work at all.

[tonyarkles]

Even just a digital snake! A pair of Ethernet cables is way way way easier to set up than a 24 channel analog snake. Plus... need a couple more inputs? Just throw another stage box up there and connect it to the switch.

I’m not in the industry but my wife is, and AES67 seems like a complete game changer.

[sethhochberg]

Yep. I was heavily involved in the live sound world right in the chapter where copper snakes were being replaced with early digital snakes, and even that was a game-changer enough on its own. Less weight, less unpredictability (even in good copper snakes, the wires are _tiny_ and prone to breakage in entertainment use), more channels, less need to differentiate between your sends and returns and keep corresponding adapters around if you had a return-heavy mix, far better options for performers to make their own unique monitor mixes on stage instead of relying on whatever submixes could be sent back from the console on the returns that happened to be available.

And that was just the early days, when even the protocols that sometimes used Ethernet were only L1 and L2 and not IP-compatible/routable. You might have had several lines of ethernet running back and forth to the stage, but couldn't comingle snakes with IP-based control systems.

AES67 and friends pushed the industry to a point where, basically, everything speaks IP. The stage remains an analog realm up to the DIs and mic premaps, and everything can be routed and distributed in almost infinite combinations from there with commodity hardware.

Its seriously as impactful as the shift from tape to digital recording in terms of the new workflow options and paradigms it opened up.

[rasz]

I know Americans love big SUVs, but I dont think even they managed to build something so large as to require compensating for the sound propagation delay.