Any audio engineer will tell you that trying to pull off a seamless, collaborative live performance or recording session with musicians performing from remote locations can be a logistical nightmare. Thankfully, Audinate’s latest Dante digital audio networking tech can help tackle this unique challenge.
Just as it did with other facets of day-to-day life, the COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a plethora of logistical challenges for houses of worship. In order to abide by social distancing guidelines, many houses of worship had to adapt by pivoting to live-streamed or recorded services to safely deliver sermons to their congregations. Remote live production using Dante is yet another option.
Dante: The solution to audio over IP networking
Audinate’s Dante digital audio is the industry standard when it comes to audio over IP networking, supplanting legacy analog audio connections that are not only significantly more cost-prohibitive but also offer much less flexibility in terms of deployment. Dante leverages conventional Ethernet networking and allows audio, control, and other data to transmit on the same network effectively.
Traditional analog audio signals convert into digital, allowing hundreds of uncompressed, multi-channel digital audio signals to transmit while remaining perfectly synchronized and perceptibly latency-free. Historically, however, this only worked if all of the Dante-compatible equipment were on the same network, which typically meant that they had to be located under one roof. Even though transmitting digital audio signals via the internet is trivial, ensuring that the various audio signals from remote locations remain in sync is anything but.
As nothing ruins a musical performance quicker than the various elements being out of sync, this limitation effectively meant real-time, long-distanced music collaboration between remotely located musicians was nigh impossible. Or so we thought.
Audinate’s DDM (Dante Domain Manager): The latest updates
Luckily, two new features recently introduced in Audinate’s DDM (Dante Domain Manager) network management software – support for SMPTE 2110 / AES67 compliant devices in Dante workflows and support for GPS Synchronization – mean that musicians can finally utilize Dante to facilitate long-distanced remote music collaborative workflows.
The two new DDM features essentially work in concert to facilitate remotely located Dante setups to remain synchronized with one another with a latency that’s under 10 nanoseconds. This virtually imperceptible latency is paramount for remotely located musicians to collaborate and perform in real-time.
Thanks to Dante’s ability to facilitate synchronized, latency-free remote music collaboration, physical restrictions are no longer a limiting factor. This opens up a whole new world of collaborative possibilities provided that all parties involved have reliable high-speed internet access.
What does this mean for your house of worship?
To put things into context, you can conceivably have an audio engineer controlling the sound mixer at a house of worship while the various instrumentalists and singers are all performing remotely from the safety and comfort of their own homes or studios, with no discernible latency to speak of.
Using Dante, houses of worship can even virtually host “visiting” musicians from around the world. Even after the world is fully recovered from the pandemic, Dante will continue to be an economically viable way for musicians to collaborate creatively over long distances. With Audinate’s Dante digital audio networking, the possibilities are truly endless.
Learn more about house of worship audio solutions via our Adorama Business Solutions team.
