[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.