Digital Audio Mixer Pt.2 | Hacker News Reader

Digital Audio Mixer Pt.2

blog.brixit.nl

29 pointsbo0tzz8 comments

I find real-time audio mixers super interesting. A lot about writing your own can seem easy, until you find yourself in a fight against latency. If you hit 30ms you're dead, the mixer will become almost useless in a live setting. That's why the big expensive equipment hasn't been replaced by iPads. The highly regarded commercial SQ mixers [0] have 0.7ms end-to-end latency thanks to an FPGA inside.

I also firmly believe that, in the future, everything will be connected via Dante [1], which will be another example of commodity(-ish) computer networks eating everything.

[0] https://www.allen-heath.com/hardware/sq/

[1] https://www.audinate.com/

> I also firmly believe that, in the future, everything will be connected via Dante

I'm yet to read the article but regarding this, Dante is a massive step forward and is currently dominating the market but I feel like we are significantly more likely to see something like AES67 disrupting the market that MADI currently hold than Dante. It does naturally help Dante's case that it has an AES67 compatible mode.

AES67 was essentially created to be the interoperability standard for Dante and Ravenna. It's compatible by design.

Dante was not by default compatible with AES67 and neither was Ravenna, it was mildly inspired by and likely many of the engineers who work on Dante also work on the AES67 spec but AES67 is an industry specification much like any IEEE would be for EE.

AES67 also happens to be the audio backbone for SMPTE2110 which is why I predict we will see much greater penetration into the market.

Throwing in a random note for anyone interested, PipeWire has aea67 support. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/32...

With my current code the latency should be lower than 10ms at least but I haven't measured it exactly yet.

I want to try adding AES67 support since the Teensy 4 has native Ethernet and the protocol isn't that complicated, but it isn't needed for this use case yet.

Hey Martijn

I was looking at possibly seeing if I could put some time in my schedule for this but I am apparently blind and am struggling to actually find the repo for this.

Could you possibly post a link here ( or even better on the blog post ) to the repo for the source?

I completely forgot to do that part, thanks for the reminder :)

The firmware is at https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/mixolydian-4x4-fw and the hardware is at https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/mixolydian-4x4

I've updated the blog post to include these links as well.

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