Broadcast Technology

When we talk about audio over IP in broadcast, the conversation almost always centres on network transport. How do we get audio from A to B over an IP network? That’s where Ravenna, AES67, Dante, and MADI-over-IP live. It’s an important problem, and the industry has largely solved it. But there’s a different problem that gets less attention: once audio arrives inside a software-defined or cloud-based facility, how does it move efficiently between applications? How does one process hand audio to the next without creating a bottleneck? ...

The audio world has its own version of the IP debate, and if you’ve spent any time around broadcast engineers in the last few years, you’ll have heard it. MADI is old technology. AoIP is the future. Dante, Ravenna, AES67 - that’s where everything is heading, and anyone still specifying MADI is stuck in the past. I’ve heard this argument a lot. I’ve also spent years working with both technologies at major live events, and my view is considerably more nuanced. ...

When planning temporary WAN services for major sports events, one question comes up again and again: how much bandwidth do our Ravenna audio streams need? Fibre connectivity is expensive, and over‑provisioning costs money. For years I used a basic Excel spreadsheet to estimate bandwidth — it worked, but it was slow to update, hard to share, and far from elegant. So I built something better. RavennaCalc is a clean, browser‑based bandwidth calculator for Ravenna/AES67 streams. It’s open‑source, takes seconds to use, and gives reliable estimates without the spreadsheet overhead. ...

Every year I go to a trade show and hear the same thing: SDI is dead, IP is the future, and anyone still running coax is holding back progress. I’ve been hearing this for the better part of a decade now. And yet, when I’m on-site at a major live event - wiring up comms systems, routing audio under pressure, troubleshooting at midnight before a show goes on air - SDI is still there, doing exactly what it’s always done. Quietly and reliably. ...