Delivering quality audio solutions continues to be a key focus for AV Concepts as the company evolves its strategy to effectively deliver cutting-edge creative and technical staging services. The need to deliver more audio channels at higher quality influenced the company to evaluate various media networking solutions available today. Seeking a solution to simplify infrastructure with flexibility to scale for event size, AV Concepts quickly focused on building a new system based on Dante. The company's first Dante networking solution was such a success that they are in the process of building a second Dante production system.
"We are winning new business because of Dante," said Jason Thiele, audio systems engineer at AV Concepts. "Engineers want to work with innovative new technology, and our research and experience has proven Dante to be our best choice as a standard networking solution."
On average, AV Concepts utilizes 180 routed channels per event. For Thiele, the headaches of the analogue universe almost always tied to configuration and troubleshooting - headaches that quickly escalated and consumed far too much of their customers' valuable time on show site. Thiele and his colleagues carefully compared Dante and several additional networking solutions but found the others underwhelming.
"We found that most of these systems were about putting a box on each end to move audio, and we wanted a more flexible system," explained Thiele. "We wanted a turnkey system that could send as many channels as we wanted across a network and covered the entire chain, right up to the PA system.
"We recognized the benefits of Dante after Yamaha launched its CL console series, and we quickly redesigned our entire infrastructure to be Dante across the board. With fibre connections and Cisco layer 3 managed switches, we can easily route whatever we need to, wherever we need to go. And we can quickly make changes to scale the network for events of any size."
That flexibility has been a major benefit of the Dante transition according to Thiele, given the drastic reduction in installation time, labour and complexity he and his team have experienced.
"With the new Dante Controller, we send the network template to the front of house (FOH) crew so they can pull up our configuration," said Thiele. "The Dante channels automatically correspond to the devices on the network. Additionally, when they load a USB stick into their console, it readily looks for the device and a specific Dante channel. Once everything is plugged in and turned on, the signals are automatically routed. There is no more worrying about a patch list from the FOH team."
Today, an AV Concepts event experience incorporates multiple Shure ULXD4Q wireless microphones, five Extron DMP128 digital matrix systems, two Yamaha Rio I/O stage boxes, and a Yamaha CL5 console with two additional Yamaha MY16-AUD cards. The infrastructure also includes 45 Dante Virtual Soundcards to enable audio networking from computing platforms, giving the AV Concepts team additional flexibility with bringing audio signals onto the network.
(Jim Evans)
