Yamaha Dante-MY16-AUD Gets Loaded With Britannia Row

And the new interface is already proving its worth to Britannia Row, one of the UK’s leading audio production companies, whether it’s in touring, festival or club systems.

Yamaha Commercial Audio is committed to seamlessly interfacing its digital audio products with the widest array of networking protocols, ensuring that any potential problems of compatibility and different proprietary technologies are no issue for a Yamaha-bases system. Audinate’s Dante system is the very latest to be adopted, with the Dante-MY16-AUD allowing Yamaha digital mixing consoles, DME processors and TXn series power amplifiers to make full use of Audinate’s ‘plug and play’ technology.

Each Dante-MY16-AUD card provides 16 bidirectional audio channels (16 channels at 48 kHz, or eight channels at 96 kHz) over Gigabit Ethernet with real time network redundancy, multiple cards supporting higher channel counts.

As a company committed to the latest technology, Britannia Row has already been extensively using the system with Yamaha products. The company’s Head of Digital and RF, Kieran Walsh, reports nothing but success.

Snow Patrol’s late 2009 UK tour featured Yamaha DME digital mix engines seamlessly slotted into a Dante network, as did the Ministry Of Sound’s huge New Year’s Eve event at London’s O2 Arena, which featured a mix of live and DJ sets by the likes of Calvin Harris, Deadmau5, Justice, Plump DJs, Eric Prydz and Example.

“We had a huge system on it and used the Dante-MY16-AUD cards in a Yamaha DM1000 console to distribute the sound for the entire event,” said Kieran. “It was a fully integrated system and it worked extremely well.”

Brit Row’s most advanced use of the technology so far, however, was at the end of August, at the Get Loaded In The Park dance event on London’s Clapham Common. With four stages across the 220 acre site and many residential properties close by, noise limits are strictly enforced by the local authorities.

“The festival has very strict sound limits so, by using Yamaha DMEs fitted with the Dante-MY16-AUD cards, we were able to have four fully-independent stages, but at the same time they had audio centralised to one point on a Dante network,” said Kieran. “This allowed feeds from all stages to be sent to a central point for noise control measures to be effected.”

“At the hub of the network, we analysed the feeds from all four stages in real time with Smaart software and could adjust the overall level of each stage to stay within the noise limits, but without anyone at the individual mix positions having to worry about it. It was completely invisible to the front of house engineers, leaving them free to concentrate solely on mixing their acts.

“I think it's the first time an integrated control audio and data network has been used on a festival site and it achieved the lowest Get Loaded In The Park off-site sound levels ever, which meant a happy local licensing authority.”

The Dante network also allowed an overall multi-band compressor to be in continuous use for each stage, making adjustments to the overall sound much more gentle.

“It’s more subtle to over compress a particular frequency band than turning it down,” said Kieran. “So being able to send a variety of control data also made a tangible improvement to the sound, as well as giving us tighter control.

“The site required a mile and a half of fibre optic, so it was impractical to double or triple the network for carrying audio and data separately. Using Dante definitely made things easier, more efficient and more tightly controlled.”

As well as the Dante cards themselves, of course the Yamaha DME hosts were a vital part of the system’s success.

“With DME it’s easy to use and program system setups. The system is very comprehensively contained and it’s very straightforward to build panels without spending a lot of graphic design time,” said Kieran.

“The combination of DME and the Dante protocol makes audio networking very straightforward. I hope it will help to demystify the setting up of all audio networks — the less it seems like a ‘black art’, the more acceptance there will be and more people will be prepared to embrace the remarkable power and flexibility that audio networking offers.”

Each Dante-MY16-AUD card also includes a licence for Audinate’s Dante Virtual Soundcard, a software program that allows any PC or Mac to act as a networked source or destination audio device. Using most types of digital audio workstation software, the computer can then be used as a recording platform with no additional hardware.

www.yamahacommercialaudio.com