‘Merging Technologies has been developing a proprietary Ethernet-based audio streaming protocol for the past two years,’ says Claude Cellier, Merging Technologies CEO. 'It was a natural progression to join forces with like minded companies in the Ravenna consortium.’
The statement accompanies the announcement that Merging Technologies has adopted Ravenna open standard real-time IP network technology at this year’s IBC. Developed by ALC NetworX, Ravenna has all the right ingredients to become the dominant IP standard in broadcast and recording.
Developed by German technology company ALC NetworX, Ravenna is designed to operate over conventional IP networks as an infrastructure agnostic protocol – it does not require special network hardware, switches, adaptors and bridges, and can operate with the majority of current network protocols and topologies. All protocols and mechanisms it employs are based on widely deployed and established methods from the IT and audio industries and, in contrast to most other audio networking solutions, Ravenna is an open technology with no proprietary licensing policy.
The technology is scalable (in line with network performance) from one or two audio channels to several hundred fully redundant channels with sample-accurate play-out alignment of all network nodes. It offers sub-sample synchronisation accuracy throughout even the largest networks while maintaining ultra-low (sub-millisecond) latency with full signal transparency. Unicast and multicast modes are supported on a per-stream basis, and Ravenna can also be used to distribute AES 11 media clock and supports multiple concurrent media clocks.
Other interested parties being welcomed by ALC NetworkX invited to participate in the ongoing development of Ravenna. ‘We expect Ravenna to become a natural and seamless extension connecting directly to our existing MassCore Processing and Mixing engine,’ Cellier says. ‘It has all the right ingredients to become our core I/O and control technology for the future.’
More: www.merging.com
