Schoolhouse Audio-Visual was first hired to repair existing loudspeakers, and soon discovered that Sojourn Church wanted to bring a number of disparate audio components into a common system. For Blair McNair, systems project manager at Schoolhouse Audio-Visual, the choice was simple.
"Dante is the first and only networking system I have looked at to date that really makes sense out of the box," said McNair. "When looking at this project, it immediately dawned on me that I can incorporate wireless microphones, in-ear monitors, consoles and front-of-house signal processing all on one network. With somewhere over 210 major manufacturers across a diverse set of markets already jumping on board, it makes me confident that Dante will be around for a long time. I am really excited about how it simplifies our world and unified the ability to transport audio to anywhere you need it to go".
Upon evaluating the existing legacy systems, McNair recommended retaining an existing Digico console, and adding a Focusrite RedNet6 interface to bring MADI channels into the Dante environment (and vice versa). The signals progress from there into an Aviom D-800 Dante system for signal distribution, which can deliver up to 64 audio channels to in-ear monitors for the church band; a BSS Audio Soundweb processor for delivery to loudspeakers; and a Dante Virtual Soundcard for multitrack recording.
According to McNair, the biggest benefits of the transition are exceptionally low latency, reduced labor costs and ease of scalability to other locations.
"My choice has always been to stay in the digital domain as much as possible," said McNair. "We keep the full bitrate count by staying digital, which lowers system noise, increases headroom, and keeps the latency very low; as compared to transitioning back and forth from digital to analogue and vice versa several times. For live sound, if the audio is three or four milliseconds delayed, the musicians feel that - especially the drummers.
"Dante reduced the latency down to one millisecond at the most, in this application, and that's over the entire network. Latency has always been an especially difficult challenge with in-ear monitors. Dante solves all of these problems, and is the first system to truly deliver a digital transport system with a wide channel count and without the latency penalty usually encountered in these systems. The band was absolutely thrilled when we launched this system."
(Jim Evans)
