California’s Harvey Mudd College has adopted Dante for a technologically advanced multipoint A/V conferencing network, giving guest lecturers the opportunity to reach larger audiences across multiple networked rooms.
Installed in the new R Michael Shanahan Center for Teaching & Learning the original system design specified AVB and CobraNet for networking audio, but the combination of technologies was driving up costs and maintenance, and failing to meet the full potential of the technology.
‘We’re a Cisco house for network switching, and it required a lot of extra labour to make the auditorium-to-classroom networking work with AVB,’ says Instructional Media Specialist, James Sadler. ‘We had to hardwire feeds to the processing equipment in our remote classrooms, and add special network switches. The CobraNet network was localized to the auditorium, but there were serious complications with network bandwidth, audio dropouts and signal latency.
The college refers to the new conferencing system as a ‘simulcasting network,’ offering two-way audio and video communication between the 300-seat auditorium, a recital hall and five classrooms. The simulcasting network was established specifically to support the unpredictable changing pedagogies and learning styles of the modern connected campus.
The Dante-based network incorporates a wide selection of interoperable A/V products, giving the college a flexible and intelligent solution for the multipoint architecture. The introduction of a Dante Interface Card for Biamp’s Tesira allowed the college to migrate the simulcasting network to Dante. While migrating to Dante, Sadler simplified the overall network architecture by transitioning all network switching to the existing Cisco infrastructure, eliminating the need to buy additional networking hardware or specialised switches. Sadler eliminated the CobraNet network by adding a Dante MY-AUD-16 module to an existing Yamaha O1V96v2 console in the auditorium’s production booth.
According to Sadler, the Dante migration took ‘about 15 minutes,’ with plug-and-play connections further simplified by adding Dante-enabled Attero Tech I/O wall plates to the network. The compact, high-density Attero Tech I/O plates were added to an electrical floor box directly beside the speaker lectern in the auditorium, enabling a clean handoff to the DSP system instead of requiring physical wire connections and special switches. The Biamp system is expandable along with Dante to ensure plenty of capacity for expansion. The infinite scalability of Dante will allow Harvey Mudd College to extend the network into other spaces as needed.
‘There is nothing complicated with this system, starting with the ease of setup that made transitioning to Dante a very time- and cost-efficient process,’ Sadler says. ‘We’ve removed the limitations of connecting to the network from the front of the auditorium. We have all the processing power and I/O capacity we need today with the Biamp system, and Dante feeds uncompressed audio to every room with virtually zero latency. The entire network is easier to configure, easier to control and easier to grow. With Dante we have reached the point where we plug almost anything into a network port and get beautiful audio quality in and out.’
Looking ahead, Sadler intends to explore using Audinate’s soon-to-be released Dante Via networking software to move audio, including Skype feeds, to and from student laptops. Dante Via removes the requirement for professional hardware, enabling a media networking platform using standard computers.
