The advantage of the K8 system, says the manufacturer, is that it carries 16 channels of uncompressed digital audio over a standard Cat 5 cable, at a rate of 48kHz, with a depth of 24 bits, and a total latency of less than 1 millisecond. The same cable also carries bi-directional data for remote monitoring and control of all devices connected within the K8 system over a single Ethernet port.
Cable lengths may be run up to a total of 200m through passively daisy-chained K8 devices. Actively refreshing the line with a K8 distribution amplifier allows "endless additions" of 200m cable lengths and adds less than 1ms of delay. For advanced applications, multi-output K8 distribution amplifiers may be used to implement a star distribution configuration and the entire system may be monitored from a single Ethernet port with no additional cabling.
"Our professional audio system products are designed to provide advantages to the system designer by offering a balance between open architecture and proprietary technologies," said Paul Nunnington, product manager for installed sound systems, Klein + Hummel. "For example, industry standard Ethersound audio networking technology is utilised as the core system backbone, while the K8 system is used as a branch distribution architecture."
"This is ideal technology for many systems such as large paging applications, multiple remote amplifier designs, or remote powered loudspeaker clusters", said David McNutt, installed sound industry team manager for Sennheiser, the parent company of Klein + Hummel.
(Jim Evans)
