Hi there I'm Tasha Danner I'm your host with Networked AV/TV where we talk about
the convergence between AV and IT. As always I'm joined by Josh Rush
of Audinate and today our guest is Roland Hemming of RH Consulting, he's
our principal consultant there. Hey Roland!
Hi! How are you doing? Very well.
So you have been in professional
audio for over 30 years now is that right? It's at 30 years this month.
Could you give us a little background on you and RH Consulting? In my career I've
done all sorts of work starting with live work and I did some early computer
control in the early parts of my career before lots of people were doing it and
then I've been lucky enough to work on some very large projects the London
Olympics and also the Millennium Dome. Both of which we call mega
projects so to speak. So most of the work I do in terms of projects is large
stuff and that means generally they have to be networked. Roland how did
you first hear about Dante? I'm pretty sure the first time I heard about Dante
was at the Plaza in autumn 2007, where I was one of the judges for the Innovation
Awards and the Dolby Lake Processor had been released which was the number of
reasons quite a revolutionary product, and then it had this port on it called
Dante and I'd been obviously familiar with audio networking for a number of
years already and this then obviously piqued my interest because this was a
whole new networking technology and it was actually fairly soon afterwards
within a year that I was using it then on my first project and inevitably with
me this wasn't just dipping my toe in the water, my first project was
on a stadium where we had 148 channels of amplification
being driven from Dante amplifiers and indeed initially we didn't have any on
ramps for Dante, so in the early testing stages we actually had some Dante
development boards to actually get audio onto the network to to send audio to
these amps and we had to wait a couple of months before the young ramps arrived.
So, that was it for me fairly early adopter and I'm pretty sure I was the
first Dante stadium. So Roland you talked a little bit about your first
introduction to Dante, what are some of the specific benefits of Dante and the
reason that you're using it on more of your jobs these days? The overall
availability of product is just know pretty much any product I want to
use now, has a Dante you know version which makes it very easy, I'm not
tied to having to use a particular type of product or manufacturer I've got a
good choice which lets me fit things in in a price competitive way. It's also
very convenient that every category of
product is now Dante. So, you know back in the day as I said my first use
for it, the only thing I had was amplifiers and an on ramp, and then you
go through a period of them using lots of interfaces to get audio on your
network and off your network and these days is less of that, an increasing
amount of equipment from microphones, radio mics and indeed just about every
decent amplifier now has Dante built-in. So you're not going on and off with
analog you're just staying natively as I said sometimes directly from the
microphone all the way to the loudspeaker.
so that choice in terms of the fact that I can pick pretty much whatever I want
is enormously useful. So why don't we shift gears a little bit and talk about Dante
Domain Manager, so that's our new network management software that we rolled out
at ISE this year and I know you've had some experience with it and know a
little bit about the product and the features, so can you talk about what
Dante Domain Manager and those features do for a networked
audio application? I think what it does, is it's another step forward in the same
way that I felt when I did that first project using Dante that, we'd gone up a
step. Dante Domain Manager to me is now taking the next step again it's like
okay we've now got a much more serious tool where we can properly talk to the
IT guys using a technology or management tools that they understand and it gives
us a much more realistic way of proposing that we put Dante onto their
network at the moment, I know from research I've done that still the amount
of networked audio around this still on its own audio network separate from
the IT and that's got to change because the IT guys aren't gonna top this
anymore they can say look wider sound have to be special and be on its own
network. We know in the past we've had limitations and frankly just
insecurities about whether we should trust it going on everything else and
along the network with everything else and Dante Domain Managers put some of
those issues at rest, because we don't have to worry about subnets anymore we
know that it's going to identify latency and clocking problems and we know that
the IT guys can work with us finally to actually look after that audio network
it's not something where they don't really understand it and it's the scary
thing that if it goes wrong, sound going wrong is catastrophic because it's so
obvious the slightest glitch will click and everybody spots it immediately. So
it really is a great tool for getting us with the IT program. For Dante Domain
Manager, what are some of the applications and use cases where you see
it being used initially? I think a really obvious use for Dante Domain Manager
even than a very small installation, is just having two domains. One for your
main installation and the other for any temporary equipment that you want to
connect. At the moment, if you've got someone wanting to plug something in,
they then have full access to your network and the fact that we don't have
to do that anymore, the fact that we can have this line in the sand this
divide between them we can only expose two channels either way or whatever we
want to them, gives your installation a great degree of security. On the larger
level, it helps get around something that we've been trying to describe to people
for a long time, which is the issue of the big venue problem and this is the
fact that we know that a lot of maintenance of audio systems takes place
in the middle of the night because it's the only time people feel safe to tinker
with things just in case they bring the whole network down. Whereas by dividing
different rooms so in a corporate environment, dividing each of your
meeting rooms into different domains things like that, you know that you can
mess with one and you're not going to mess with anything else because you can
see it you're siloed. As a consultant how would you describe Dante
Domain Manager to a client? I think what I'd say to them is as part of the
delivery of this project, we're using networked audio and we know increasingly
actually it's the only way to deliver some projects is by using that if you've
got something on a very large scale. But, even smaller projects, we're networking
now because it's just how you do it these days and I would just simply
say to go along with that you need to have some sensible management because
the risks of not managing your system can be quite high for the reasons that
I've for the reasons that I've described before in terms of security
knowing what's going on, engagement with the IT department which you as a client
want us to do, you wants us to become friends with them as opposed to this
separate service that just uses similar technology. So without pushing it to say
it's just a prerequisite, it's like well why wouldn't you use this? Because
it's gonna make you more secure and have better monitoring and management of your
system. Well thank you so much Roland, we learned a lot today thanks for joining
us! It was great and live from London! If you're interested in learning more about
Dante or Dante Domain Manager just visit Audinate.com