Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic higher educational institution has opened a self-contained blackbox-style recording space with live performance and audiovisual production capabilities for students. The audio infrastructure is built around a Dante Audio-over-IP network from Audinate.

Conceptualised by Kim Lau – formerly Senior Sanager of A/V technology for the Ngee Ann Polytechnic and now an adviser to the facility – the transition to Dante from legacy interconnections and EtherSound solved the integration and budgetary challenges of building a second digital studio to complement an existing hybrid recording space running on an Avid system.

Instead, Dante allowed the creation of a single production area split into four areas – two isolation booths running digital audio workstations; one live sound area with house mixers for musical workshops and practice; and another area equipped with Mac workstations for recording projects.

Lau’s goal was to establish a larger space for students to record and mix projects in a way that represents a real-world professional recording studio. He also wanted to design an infrastructure that could easily incorporate video signals and lighting for live production purposes, with a common network to transport audio, video and control signals between locations. In his design, Dante shares a dedicated VLan with control signals without any disruption to Dante’s reliability or digital audio quality.

‘We saved a significant amount of time and money by deploying Dante, which removed any need to pull XLR cables or multicore from booth to booth. The Dante network uses five interconnection points and a master off-the-shelf switch, and that’s it,’ he reports. ‘The limitations of EtherSound meant that we relied on various bridge and interface devices to move signals, with limited capacity.

‘We transitioned from a daisy-chained architecture to true digital audio networking. Dante clearly provided the low latency, flexibility and capacity we needed to achieve our goals. Dante’s Layer 3 backbone also gives us the flexibility to distribute signals outside of the self-contained recording space to performance venues, which is a benefit we expect to take advantage of in the near future.’

With an Avid S6 console and Pro Tools at its core, the recording system incorporates a Dante-enabled DAD AX32 I/O interface, with Dante Virtual Soundcard running on all five Macs. The live area is served by DiGiCo S21 and Yamaha Q1 console – both Dante-enabled – complemented by a Rio 1608-D stagebox to support all I/O connectivity.

‘Dante Virtual Soundcard removes the need to use a dedicated audio interface,’ Lau says. ‘We can route sound from any of the Mac workstations to the house system, all over the Dante network. At the same time, Dante has removed much of the burden traditionally associated with digital monitoring in conventional audio production, where we would have to rely on clocking locked into a specific sample rate. We can now connect to various devices for monitoring with ease over the Dante network, and even support varied sample rates.’

This is especially useful for students working on individual devices. In most cases, the live sound space runs at 48kHz and recording at 96kHz. This can create a very complex situation as users manage and monitor signals with varied sample rates over a common network.

‘Even with everyone working on separate devices, Dante recognises these varying rates and synchronises all of them on the network,’ Lau says. ‘That is a huge benefit. From start to finish, Dante has made my life a lot easier.’