MOTU AVB Interfaces

[ghettosynth]

I'm curious if anyone has direct experience with this, especially in a small setup.

If I understand this correctly, you can connect interfaces together via ethernet, AVB switch required for more than two. As far as I can tell, you still need standard USB ASIO drivers on windows machines, but, once you have that then you can route from audio interfaces across the network?

It also seems that you can use a mac to access an interface via ethernet, but it's not clear to me that you can just plugin to a AVB switch and then connect to any interface on the network, or, simply route audio from interfaces that are on the network. Also, it's not clear to me whether the midi interfaces are accessible naturally over the network, or if that's not even in the picture. In any case, midi over ethernet is easier to solve than audio over ethernet, so I'm less concerned about that. If I understand correctly, there are no consumer switches that have AVB functionality by default and there is no easy way to make use of AVB with ASIO on Windows?

What I'm looking for is to connect several areas with ethernet and freely route audio (and ideally midi) between them. At the moment this problem is lamely solved with some long runs of balanced connections.

[ddllff]

Same here ! Also wondering if f.i. multiple computers in the network can share the same AVB device, each using 2 different ports ?

[pekbro]

Looking through the docs, it should work fine under windows. So long as you have interfaces that support AVB.
It's just a protocol, the ASIO thing under windows is just due to the lack of core audio no doubt. The switch, seems a convenience, but not absolutely necessary to connect more than one interface together.

Anyway, just email them to verify. MOTU is pretty helpful IME.

Certainly seems pretty cool, although the industry has been slow to adopt the standard. Hence the lack of AVB compatibles switches. There is an OEM switch available direct from the manufacturer.

Avid, Presonus and Yamaha are alternatives to MOTU, although they seem the most affordable solution.

[ghettosynth]

Looking through the docs, it should work fine under windows. So long as you have interfaces that support AVB.
It's just a protocol, the ASIO thing under windows is just due to the lack of core audio no doubt. The switch, seems a convenience, but not absolutely necessary to connect more than one interface together.

It's not that simple. You need two things to make pure audio routing under windows work, 1) a NIC that supports AVB, and 2) an ASIO driver. You can certainly use any NIC to control the Ultralite if you are not routing audio over it, but not so if you want to run AVB streams. AFAIK, certain Intel server NICS supposedly support AVB, but, there is no ASIO driver for them. You can't simply dismiss the ASIO aspect as "just a protocol thing." Without an ASIO driver there is no link between your audio applications and either the remote interfaces or other applications run on other AVB networked machines. Echo is getting into that space and have a NIC with driver that will support 64 streams, but, it costs $800. If you really need it and want things to be clean and reliable, that's probably not that expensive. For me, I think that using a Ultralite AVB as a windows network audio interface is a better option, it's cheaper, and has I/O.

The switch isn't necessary for one or two interfaces, but is absolutely necessary for more than two audio routing networked connections. You cannot use a standard switch to route AVB network packets.

This stuff is really in early days yet, especially for the prosumer market. On the one hand I'm tempted. I could network all of my studio computers for about $1500 and that would allow me to have an interface in my hardware studio that would make it easier to bring my analog synths into my ITB workflow. I would still need a different midi routing solution. OTOH, I could just wait a year or two and just do without because as soon as anyone else enters the game, competition will heat up.

I'm not really confused about a basic textbook understanding of the technology. What I'm interested in is in talking to people who have actually used this gear. What kind of incompatibilities did they run into, what kind of limitations did they find, how did the network impact actual latency? There is some discussion of incompatibility between the Echo NIC and the MOTO hub, for example.

I've tried almost all of the inexpensive alternatives that run over standard ethernet. Nothing is really sufficiently reliable with a low enough latency for me to use it really which is why I'm curious about AVB.

[pekbro]

Hmm, well that seems pretty worthless. According to the docs, you can connect more than a couple interface via their network ports. It sure sounded to me that so long as they support AVB they should work over a standard network. Minus things like zero config and auto discovery.

Certainly you're probably right. I would email MOTU to be sure. That would certainly put the kaibosh on the system for windows users. But from all the docs on their site it sure seems like it would still work, just not as snazily.
If what your saying is true, they should clearly state you can not do it under windows, and they don't as far as I saw.
All the Avid and presonus stuff works over windows just fine from what I saw.
Only the cost of deployment for those systems far exceed the MOTU stuff.

*shrugs

I mean Cmon, Even that analyzer from flux that we got for free can do it with only Bonjure.

[ghettosynth]

Hmm, well that seems pretty worthless. According to the docs, you can connect more than a couple interface via their network ports. It sure sounded to me that so long as they support AVB they should work over a standard network. Minus things like zero config and auto discovery.

Certainly you're probably right. I would email MOTU to be sure. That would certainly put the kaibosh on the system for windows users. But from all the docs on their site it sure seems like it would still work, just not as snazily.
If what your saying is true, they should clearly state you can not do it under windows, and they don't as far as I saw.
All the Avid and presonus stuff works over windows just fine from what I saw.
Only the cost of deployment for those systems far exceed the MOTU stuff.

*shrugs

I mean Cmon, Even that analyzer from flux that we got for free can do it with only Bonjure.

I'm not going all the way to "worthless", but, AT the moment there's no way to inexpensively hook up a bunch of (Windows) PCs, a hub, and a single networked interface and route between the PCs. I'm not even sure how well it works on the MAC TBH, which is why I wanted people who have used them to chime in.

What I think is possible, however, is that if you put a Ultralite AVB on each Windows PC (via USB) and then connect them all together with an AVB hub, that you can route audio between all of the PCs because the Ultralite AVB essentially acts as your ASIO interface to the network. Again, I'd like to hear from people that have actually done this to understand how well it actually works.

[pekbro]

Yeah I got that about folks who have used it. Coming from an HPC background, I just found it interesting enough to check into. Anyone who's worked In parallel computing is likely to be interested in the tech.

-cheers