Audio over fiber

Hi,

I am spec'ing out an installed audio / fiber system for transporting critical audio over some dedicated fibers. I've got both single-mode and multi-mode fibers available and need no more than eight channels in either direction (can use dedicated fiber strands for each direction). One side needs to be all analog AD and DA while the other side needs to be a mix of AD and DA as well as AES.

What would be ideal is a rackmount chassis with some cards for AD, DA, and AES I/O's where the two chassis are connected via duplex fibers. Digital snake with various format conversion options on either side.

I've got a number of options available so far but not one system which integrates the fiber, AD, DA, and AES I/O into a nice tidy package.

Any experience with a similar system? I am very interested in your thoughts.

There is also a video monitoring component to the system but Aja has boxes which will do SDI encode on the remote end and HDMI decode on the local end via a single-mode fiber so that part is sorted.

Appreciate it!

Cheers,
jonathan

Have a look at the Lynx Aurora 16, it does 16 channels of AES I/O and 16 channels of Analog I/O, if you add in the Lynx LT-Madi card it will squirt it down fibre as Madi.

Alternatively if price is no issue and you want more flexibility to grow you could check out Lawo Nova 17 or Stagetec Nexus, they have more modular solutions and they are routers as well.

Michael

Thanks! Looks like the aurora's will do. They do allow channel by channel routing in conjunction with their madi cards according to their docu. I am interested in how they preserve the routings after a reboot if anyone has any good or bad experiences with this. I only need six channels each way and the critical ones are aes-madi-aes but the aurora ad's/da's will make pristine and reliable comms, PA, and PGM feeds. 

Cheers,
jb

Some of the Roland Snake stuff is rather nice. 118dB ADC's and DAC's in the good stuff.

I've got some RME MADI gear that is great. Have not had to reboot it in about two years so that's an option too. I was hoping to find something with some more flexible routing capabilities as well as analog and aes I/O's on each side all rolled into a nice compact package. The Aurora fits that bill on all accounts except the fact that their LT-MADI card is special order (not stocked) which tells me that it may not even exist or have much field-testing. We use a bunch of the Lynx HW and it has proven to be very robust over time regarding stability, reliability, and all-around-quality but I have not used or been exposed to their MADI capabilities up to this point so I naturally question the availability of spares and robustness of the HW/SW involved.

I also have a Roland "digital snake" in service which uses cat5 and that has also proven quite reliable over a hand-full of years. I'll check out their other transport and I/O options to see if I can come up with something that will do analog and aes I/O's over either single-mode or multi-mode fiber..

Thanks for the ref's so far!

Comments/thoughts/pro's/con's are much appreciated!

Cheers,
jb

0dbfs said:

Comments/thoughts/pro's/con's are much appreciated!

Click to expand...

A digital snake is actually a good idea for DIY. Think about it. All you need to do is to mux your serial data streams on the transmit side and demux on the receive side. If both sides agree on the sample frequency, you won't even need PLL clock recovery.

One of these days I'll build one. I have all of the parts around here.

-a