Ethernet As Audio input

[gjohung]

I may have a far fetched concept. But it may have done before. We use Aviom personal monitoring system through a Yamaha digital mixer. It is audio source is connected with Cat 5 cables daisy chained and using a personal mixer for each musicians. The mixer I assume is doing some-kind of Digital to Analogue conversion.,
Now if you connect a "raw" Cat 5 cable to Mac will it understand it as a audio data natively. Say if you launch ProTools, will it understand the audio signal without as audio interface. I assume it will rely on operating system.

May be I am not stretching too far..

[skizzo]

Pro Tools would need to have an option to select one of the two (or other ports if have added them via PCIe) Ethernet ports as an input source...or basically as the "interface". And that option does not exist to my knowledge.

[BScout]

Originally Posted by gjohung

Now if you connect a "raw" Cat 5 cable to Mac will it understand it as a audio data natively. Say if you launch ProTools, will it understand the audio signal without as audio interface.

No. You need an audio driver that Pro Tools can talk to that also understands the incoming network audio. It would sit between what Pro Tools talks to and what the Aviom sends.

Things like Dante virtual soundcard do this job for the Dante protocol.

Aviom uses their own protocol (A-Net). Aviom do make a bridge for Aviom to Dante but it is a distributor only (it takes the input from the Aviom and sends output via Dante.) So with that bridge and the Dante Virtual Soundcard, you could receive audio from the Aviom into Pro Tools direct. But you could not send audio from Pro Tools to the Aviom.

[LDS]

Yeah, it is all about protocols. Dante, Ethersound, AVB, CobraNet, Soundgrid, etc all function over cat5 ethernet connections. If your plan is to connect the Yamaha mixer to your MacBook, then it is probably best to insert a Dante card in it. This will work with your mac's ethernet port when you install the Dante Virtual Soundcard driver.

I have no idea if they play nicely together, but a lot of the yamaha desks have more than one card slot. It may well be possible to run the A-Net card for the Aviom system and the Dante card side by side. It might be worth researching.