Audio Over Ethernet - Voice Over Booth

[matthewtantrwm]

Hi everyone,

I have a small voice over booth in our offices which we use for creative video publications.
Acoustically it's great, well padded and very quiet.

However, we're now looking at solutions to audio over ethernet. Essentially we want to be able to run the audio stream over our office network and be able to access the microphone from any computer in the office. We have several iMac and Macbook computers, each running different projects at a time so being able to run the audio to any computer straight into a specific project without messing around with a dedicated machine and file transfer would be ideal.

Obviously since we're recording one microphone (XLR condenser) a multi-input device would be overkill. Are there any interfaces that would allow us to achieve audio over ethernet that are cost effective and relatively simple to operate?

Thanks in advance.

[johnv]

My first thought here is that you're looking at ethernet/Lan Audio distribution which would be DANTE.
it's IP audio over cat5/6 and dead-simple.
one company's answer is
https://us.focusrite.com/sites/default/ ... c_US_0.pdf

this, from RADIO DESIGN LABS is a duplex-box-mounted unit that sends (2 mic-or-line inputs) and receives 2 channels of audio over DANTE.
DD-BN22 Wall-Mounted Bi-Directional Mic/Line Dante Interface 2 x 2

this should get you going on research.

[DanCostello]

We use Dante at the office to connect our audio editing rooms to our recording booth, and in some ways, it's great. But it does have drawbacks with the biggest being that your latency will be too high for the talent to be able to monitor themselves after an ad/da stage. I get 4ms @ 96kHz over Dante Virtual Soundcard, which is way too high. The RedNet PCIe card claims to get less than 3ms, but that still strikes me as too high, so you will need an all-analog monitoring solution in the booth for the talent. That's not a big or necessarily expensive deal, but it's something to think about.

Audinate has a page on their site that lists all the Dante-enable equipment available, and there aren't many standalone mic preamps on the list. Those that exist tend to be 4 or (mostly) 8 channels. And they're not cheap.

The cheapest you'll find with remote control preamps is probably going to be something targeted at the lower end live sound market, like one of the rackmount Behringer mixers with wifi iPad control and a Dante expansion card. I haven't used one of those remotely, but it can't be too hard.

What you could do is have a line-level Dante interface in the booth along with a regular non-remote controllable mic preamp that you just set to a good level at the beginning of the session and leave there. That's what we do.