Audio Monitoring In A 'Hybrid' World

Audio monitoring has come a long way since its humble beginnings of a box with a speaker, a volume control and an analogue input. Today's high-end audio monitoring units boast an impressive array of I/O such as SDI, MADI, AES-3 and Analogue while offering a large amount of functionality such as accurate metering, loudness measurement, Dolby decoding, metadata analysis and video confidence monitoring.

There is, however, a huge new challenge in the world of broadcast in the form of video and audio over IP, which will turn everything upside down. Although it has been on the horizon for some time now, it is gathering pace and momentum and can no longer be stopped. The early adopters have already deployed systems. As a leading manufacturer of audio monitors this is set to keep us very busy for the foreseeable future. One of the main challenges to date has been the standards uncertainty, with different proposals from leading infrastructure manufacturers that have been causing confusion, but there are very encouraging signs that would suggest the work of AIMS, together with leading manufacturers, is moving us closer to a consensus on the way forward. The main forerunners are S2022-6, TR-03 and TR-04 for video over IP, and AES67, Dante and Ravenna leading the charge in audio over IP.

One of the fundamental differences when monitoring a traditional 3G-SDI signal vs (for example) a S2022-6 video over IP stream is how the signals make their way to the audio monitor.

In a traditional set-up the 3G-SDI input of the audio monitor would be connected to the output of a video router and, using a router control panel, any signal available in the video router can be routed ready for monitoring. In the case of S2022-6 this is a very different story, as all signal routing is now taken care of in the IP domain and the physical connection is now a 10Gig-e bi-directional pipe into the network, which can carry a number of different signals. This differs radically in that an audio monitor can now monitor any stream available on the network by signing up to a multicast rather than having a video signal sent to it by a hardware router.

Although being able to sign up to any multicast stream on the network sounds like an exciting prospect, typing in IP addresses in order to monitor a signal does not exactly rank highly on the list of usability. Luckily there are some comprehensive control protocols on the horizon that will help to deal with this signal management. In the meantime, however, we are hard at work making the user experience as positive and simple as possible while also making control available to 3rd parties through an API for integration in 3rd party control systems.

Although the IP revolution is very exciting, as an industry we are also very aware that this is not going to replace good old fashioned SDI-based infrastructure overnight. This is where broadcasters face a challenge when making investment decisions, and this is no different when it comes to audio monitoring solutions. At TSL Products we are very much aware of our customers' 'hybrid' needs where they will want to monitor 3G-SDI or MADI alongside audio and video over IP in a single audio monitoring product. The recently launched PAM-IP was developed with that specific goal in mind, allowing users to monitor 3G-SDI, 12G-SDI, AES-3 and analogue alongside S2022-6 (uncompressed video over IP) and Dante/AES67 (audio over IP) without compromising on any of the functionality expected from a modern high-end audio monitor.

There is a lot of change on the way and we are leading the charge from the front. No broadcast system is complete without an audio monitor so it is paramount that we understand our customers' requirements with regards monitoring both in the 'hybrid' stage we are entering now and beyond, where IP will be the sole transport medium.

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