Mixbus Gets PTP Smart With ARG

Mixbus, the creation of ex-BBC sound supervisor Conrad Fletcher, is a large-format sound recording and live broadcast vehicle built to produce audio for even the largest shows with reliability, style and clarity.

It broadcasts many high profile events, most recently three Live to Cinema productions from the Garrick Theatre for the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company, aired to more than 41 countries.

Conrad has been a longstanding user of Merging Technologies' Pyramix and Mixbus's audio system includes Merging's HAPI multi-format converters that incorporate Ravenna Audio-over-IP providing extra connections to Mixbus's various audio workstations. The addition of the DirectOut MONTONE.42 Ravenna to MADI bridge to the system offered expansion of this Ravenna capability.

It soon became apparent that the mixed economy of traditional audio system clocks and network clocking provided by Ravenna's PTP version 2 required more durable management of the network clocks.

Conrad turned to Aspen Media to help him solve this problem and having recently taken on the UK distribution for audio applications of the ARG Quarra range, Director Chris Collings offered Mixbus an ARG Quarra PTP Smart switch that provides a direct hardware path for PTP timing data, bypassing data queues within the switch that would inevitably delay sync packets that require the highest priority despite high network activity distributing hundreds of audio channels.

Transparent PTP provided by v2 of the PTP network timing standard and a PTP Smart switch is the Audio-over-IP equivalent to the independent distribution of audio system clocks employed in all professional audio and broadcast systems.

Installing the ARG Quarra PTP Smart switch into the Mixbus's system resulted in the MONTONE display showing 100 times better jitter performance improving overall audio quality and delivering a more stable system that is better equipped to accept signals from 3rd party systems via traditional MADI.

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www.aspen-media.com