Page 7 - ADVANCING AOIP FOR BROADCAST

Highligh ng Three Things You Need To Know About
Network Switches
You’re about to embark on a social experiment.
You’ve selected the perfect control surfaces and the audio network is almost laid out for your new studios. Everyone and everything speaks broadcast and, so far, you haven’t had to take up IT as a second language. But now you’re about to drop a couple of network switches into the middle of it all and you’re worried that things could erupt into a civil war between this newer IT world and the radio cavalry.
Relax. You’ll be glad to know that our engineers have already done the tes ng and ve ng for you. Here are three important characteris cs they look for in a network switch.
Fully managed.
We use managed switches rather than unmanaged switches for WheatNet- IP audio networks because this type of switch allows us to con gure the switch to operate most e ciently
in IP audio networks. Management also allows us to control and monitor the switch during opera on; for example, we can directly gauge switch bandwidth usage.
Robust IGMP (Mul cast) Capability.
Switches with good, complete
IGMP implementa ons allow a large number of mul cast streams to pass unhindered through the network. They also allow us to keep track of streams in use, and prune those which are no longer needed.
Fast.
Switches in IP audio networks control a large amount of tra c. This requires fast, high-capacity switching fabric inside the switch, as well as gigabit connec vity. This combina on results in near-zero latency, reliability, and a whole lot more.
Wheatstone engineers perform tes ng in order to develop a list of switches known to be suitable for the WheatNet-IP audio network. Your Wheatstone sales engineer can help you in selec ng and obtaining these switches. We recommend that you install dedicated switches for your audio network; never share switches with the o ce LAN. You can always install separate NIC cards in worksta ons or servers – one for the enterprise LAN and another for the audio network – to provide access to both networks.
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