The San Jose State University (SJSU) College of the Humanities and the Arts’ Department of Television, Radio, Film and Theatre (TRFT) offers a state-of-the-art TV production infrastructure that provides hands-on training and experience to students preparing for careers in television, radio, film and multimedia.
The Tech Decision
As part of the renovations of the Hammer Theatre Center and the SJSU on-campus media facilities, the TRFT team needed to make it faster and easier to manage the set-up and distribution of multichannel audio signals between these venues.
To accomplish this, they chose to deploy a Dante from Audinate, which added capacity, accelerated deployment, simplified connectivity, and reduced the integration costs and time.
Today, the Hammer Theatre Center resides on the same Dante audio over IP network that serves the campus-based facilities.
The Solution
The Dante audio network was part of a multi-million dollar renovation of SJSU’s campus media facilities that included HDTV cameras, a 900-square foot studio with a green screen, an LED lighting grid in the TV studio, and an adjacent control room equipped with professional graphics.
One key benefit of the Dante audio network is that there is virtually no latency, or delay, in the signal transport. The customer estimated a delay of only 3 to 5 milliseconds, primarily if the signal must travel between Dante digital and analog audio devices on the network. Removal of noise and latency results in cleaner, high-quality sound.
They can now access and control a wide range of devices on the network just by opening up Dante Controller software. In fact, this is how they now “patch audio” between Dante-enabled devices. To do so, they only need to run two Cat-6 Ethernet cables instead of running 64 strands of analog wire between devices, which saves considerable time and labor.
The Impact
The seamless interoperability between all Dante products and networking has greatly enhanced how the TRFT staff and the Hammer Theatre Center now route and manage audio for live theater productions, as well as their curriculum-based and online video projects in the campus TV studio.
In configuring its Dante audio over IP network, the department added off-the-shelf Cisco SG300 switches for the Dante networks as well as a third for the control subnet on the SJSU domain. This keeps the Dante and the SJSU control network separate.
In the event that a guest performer brings in an analog console or other system that cannot be used on the Dante digital network, this gives the engineers the option of running analog or Dante inputs to the amplifier racks based on the project’s unique needs.
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