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AES67/Revenna

"My feeling is that for high quality audio over the network a AES67 style protocol like e.g. Ravenna is a better choice."

This may be, especially if one purchases very expensive high quality devices. However, be warned. The protocol is much like AES/EBU in regard to flexibility of clocking. It can be run with clocking in the transport, clocking at a separate node, and clocking at the DAC, depending on how the network is set up (within the limitations of individual products). If clocking is at the transport the situation will be like AES or SPDIF, and jitter on the cables may possibly affect jitter at the digital to analog conversion. The cable will be in the signal path and even if there is complete noise suppression in the DAC there may still be a timing effect.

The clocking in AES67/Ravenna is very complex, as it depends on network time synchronization (NTP protocol). In principle this can be made to work well, but the situation is much more complex than the previous generation of digital wiring for studios. The lowest jitter clocks are not variable or synthesized, they are fixed crystal oscillators and these can't be used with Ravenna unless they are the clock master or unless the DAC itself is using an asynchronous sample rate converter. {All this complexity is needed in studios to allow for multiple channels with multiple boxes of ADCs and DACs. None of this complexity is necessary or appropriate for typical audiophile systems where there is one box that performs a DAC function for all the available channels. In addition, studios require very low latency to make overdubbing possible, something that is irrelevant with usual music playback, although it is relevant if the same equipment is used for teleconferencing.)


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • AES67/Revenna - Tony Lauck 07/8/1508:23:47 07/8/15 (2)

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