Utah State University goes remote with Dante
- Details
A major component to successfully bringing these presentations to all students is utilizing the latest AV technology - and that’s why Utah State University relies on Audinate’s Dante and Dante Domain Manager to ensure students are connected with crystal clear audio.
Jim Wellings is the senior systems designer and programmer for the Academic and Instructional Services Department at Utah State University. Wellings and his team design, install and manage all classroom IT systems for the Logan campus and its several remote facilities. The team is also responsible for scheduling remote class broadcasts and operating the systems.
"We manage all the educational live broadcasting for about 600 endpoints around the state; essentially, 600 classrooms either for sending or receiving instruction," explains Wellings. "We use a mix of wireless and beamforming ceiling microphones from Sennheiser and Shure in the classrooms, all connected on a Dante audio network through our DSPs."
Dante is a complete audio networking solution and has become a standard for digital audio networking. With Dante, universities dramatically reduce their analogue cabling by sending hundreds of audio channels over a single ethernet cable. This saves significant time and money without compromising quality. Dante distributes uncompressed, multi-channel digital audio with near-zero latency and perfect synchronization - allowing users to experience pristine audio quality with no interference and no ground hum even over long distances.
Wellings says a common use for the system at Utah State has an instructor in a classroom on campus, with several remote classrooms around the state, all network connected to video conferencing devices. This allows for broadcast out to remote locations. Audio from a set of ceiling microphones at the remote facilities is routed across the network to video codecs for connection back to the instructor's classroom. This allows students at the distance learning sites to be heard and interact with the presentation as well.
The department offers close to 400 remote classes per week, with 20 to 25 students in each of the remote classrooms. Depending on the specific course, some lectures are recorded and made available to students, while other courses are only available in realtime, online.
“We use a set of Dante-enabled Crestron DSP units and some BSS DSP systems to bring together all the audio streams from our Dante-ready ceiling microphones,” says Wellings. "We also purchased an enterprise version of Dante Domain Manager so we can manage Dante routing at all locations.”
(Jim Evans)
