it would be reliable?

[averombri]

Hi everybody!
any of you have any experince with AVB network? i though on AVB Echo NIC1 network card and a pair of NSB 16:8 from Presonus... have I any choice this gear work together with SAC? thanks in advance

[Peter O]

Much of the "stability" is related to the ASIO driver, so it's hard to tell how good that is without testing it in a real setup, but I think there's a pretty good chance it will be stable.
Another thing to consider is gain and phantom control. From my (quick) look at the Presonus website it seems that you will have to run the Presonus UC Surface software to control the preamps and how well that coexists with SAC is also something that will need to be tested.

[Wurst Werner]

Stay away from that Echo card as well from that Hono AVB virtual soundcard. Both of them need the intel i210 gigabit ethernet controller driver to work. But according to guys over in the Avid forum (Avid uses AVB as well) both solutions are not good to work with anyway.
Maybe look into the new RME stuff.
I will get the RME Digiface DANTE and AVB for a review-->
watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFK638mgcE8)
According to RME both of them will work stable within the 32Samples range. I will try to get them running with Behringer X32 gear, the Yamaha TIOs (DANTE) and the PreSonus NSB stageboxes as well. I will let you know how and if it performs.
Regarding the stageboxes, like Peter mentioned, their gain/48V/Polarity must be set with original vendor software (X-Edit, UC Surface and such).

[cgrafx]

Stay away from that Echo card as well from that Hono AVB virtual soundcard. Both of them need the intel i210 gigabit ethernet controller driver to work. But according to guys over in the Avid forum (Avid uses AVB as well) both solutions are not good to work with anyway.
Maybe look into the new RME stuff.
I will get the RME Digiface DANTE and AVB for a review-->
watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFK638mgcE8)
According to RME both of them will work stable within the 32Samples range. I will try to get them running with Behringer X32 gear, the Yamaha TIOs (DANTE) and the PreSonus NSB stageboxes as well. I will let you know how and if it performs.
Regarding the stageboxes, like Peter mentioned, their gain/48V/Polarity must be set with original vendor software (X-Edit, UC Surface and such).

As much as I like RME products this seems pointless. The entire point of going to AVB or Dante is not to do so over USB.

If your going to go USB to AVB, you might as well just use something like the MOTU interfaces that have that functionality already built in.

[Wurst Werner]

As much as I like RME products this seems pointless. The entire point of going to AVB or Dante is not to do so over USB.

If your going to go USB to AVB, you might as well just use something like the MOTU interfaces that have that functionality already built in.

Sorry, but the Motu AVB stuff is just horrible. Terrible workflow and no good at all latency wise.
According to RME, their Digiface DANTE is in the same ballpark as the DANTE PCIe card concerning latency. Very likely that the Digiface AVB will perform similar. The RME developer said also, that they might code their own AVB driver for Mac, because the generic Apple AVB driver solution is not fast enough for their taste.
Go figure!

[cgrafx]

Sorry, but the Motu AVB stuff is just horrible. Terrible workflow and no good at all latency wise.
According to RME, their Digiface DANTE is in the same ballpark as the DANTE PCIe card concerning latency. Very likely that the Digiface AVB will perform similar. The RME developer said also, that they might code their own AVB driver for Mac, because the generic Apple AVB driver solution is not fast enough for their taste.
Go figure!

What exactly is wrong with MOTU's AVB Latency?

Low, fixed network latency. Standard AVB network latency is fixed at 2 ms. MOTU AVB network latency is an astonishing 0.625 ms (fixed), even over 7 "hops" (switches) and hundreds of meters of cable. That's only 30 samples when the system is operating at 48 kHz.

They have low latency USB and Thunderbolt ASIO drivers:
MOTU 8M: Over Thunderbolt, round trip host latency is 1.4 ms, from analog in, through the host, to analog out (@ 96 kHz with a 32-sample host buffer).

I can't speak to their AVB workflow, but the GUI for all of their new interfaces is HTML based and works very nicely over standard ethernet.

I'm in the middle of doing a swap from my Behringer ADA8200 setup to a MOTU 8M setup with a remote 24ch split.

Although initially I will only be using AVB support for the split. Audio into my SAC rig will still be ADAT through an RME card.

[Wurst Werner]

I reviewed the Motu AVB gear in January 2016 including the Stage B16 stagebox and I wasn't impressed at all. The HTML user interface was very clumsy and slow, f.e. switching views took "forever" on computer or iPad. I used a 2011 MBP (i7, 8G RAM). USB Buffersizes lower than 128 Samples with bigger DAW sessions were not useable. Adding or removing AVB devices to the network resulted in dropouts of the complete system. Maybe the latest driver are better, back then is was really sluggish. Not in the same ballpark like the RME stuff.

[averombri]

thanks guys, it is my first news about RME Dante/AVB, I trust a lot in RME since long time ago, i though on ECHO looking up a PCIe AVB card, but I guess USB3 should be powerful enough to carry out this task, thanks again for advicing!

[RBIngraham]

I just spoke with Echo a week or two ago. They told me straight up that they are not really concentrating on AVB and audio any longer. So you really don't want that Echo AVB NIC card. As has been pointed out.

I've been told that the Presonus gear is not very reliable at talking to other AVB devices. I wouldn't buy anything I couldn't return after testing or get a demo unit of before I buy. This is pretty much across the board with AVB. It's still too much the wild west.

Dante is much better from a dependibility point of view. All the chips are made by Audinate. You can get a Dante PCIe card and use that with a Yamaha TIO. That's about as affordable as networked audio gets. It works well, at least with other software. Can't speak to SAC.