Need ideas for sending 2-track live mixes for streaming radio feed

[Angie]

If you really want to go digital, you should start by asking the station engineer what their equipment needs. If they are equipped to only receive SPDIF or optical, why bother? Go with analog cat5. Supplying the connectivity on their end will be a lot less expensive than having to supply a convertor for them.

[Trackzilla]

I use shielded CAT5/CAT6 all of the time for audio runs. Up to 4 channels per cable with a common shield & just hit any isolator at the other end if you are hummy (ebtek, art, behringer, whatever hum eliminator you are fond of)...cheap, works great, easy to spec into new installations, and you can break it out however you need to get you where you need to be.

[TomyN]

Hi,

well the distance you mentioned is out of the normal LAN specs.
So I'd avoid trying to handle it with LAN equipment (except optical cable).
I'd stick with analoge audio as long as there is no digital need on the receiver side.
I use AES/EBU for stereo out for a long time, but only for distances below 70 meters (approx 200ft) and it works perfect with a 110Ohm Cable.

Tomy

[UpTilDawn]

Hey! Thanks for all the great suggestions!
All things considered, it's looking like I might stay with the analog run through the sound system snake, as I've been doing.

The cat5 route with a diy "dropKitty" like Trackzilla has been talking about sounds like something I'll experiment with, though. I've seen the ETS stuff and might consider buying something like that, if I get too lazy.

Maybe I'll put together the boxes and then test with a shorter run first.
I'm concerned about making a 400-500 ft run, outdoors.... we'll see what happens.

I've already been told the radio station doesn't want to risk going wireless, so that's out for this gig, at least. I'd love to go wireless, otherwise.

There's a lot of good ideas here... Wish I had the time, money and energy to try all of them.

[Mattseymour]

As a former BBC radio guy I can attest to the importance of keeping things simple. It's amazing how rarely smaller stations go digital. Old well made analogue gear can keep working for ever and they tend to stick with it.

One thing you haven't said is whether there's anything wrong with the signal the radio tent is getting. In our (very) old ob van there were inputs and drivers for long runs. Basically just had some eq to compensate for the losses on the long runs. I'd do what you've suggested and stick with analogue, just because it's simple, needs no extra hardware so is cheap, and you can easily trace problems without having to worry about whether there's no signal because the clocks can't lock or because someone damaged the cable. Add some top end boost to your output and all should be good.

[UpTilDawn]

Nothing particularly wrong with the current system.... signal is more-or-less clean. It always takes us a little while to track down and eliminate the inevitable stray hum, even after isolators, but we get it done. The station and listeners tells me that it sounds great, but I have no way to confirm that for myself, since it's live and I'm in the middle of it. I have to assume that it's cool.

Tear down at festival's end is frantic, what with me having to chase down and corral isolators, extra mic cables and audience mics/stands/cables before they get swallowed up by the very efficient sound company's road crew, as well as safeguarding the splitter snake removal and packing, gets to be a bit much - even with a helper - but that's just how it is.

In the end, it wouldn't really be less work, 'cause instead of chasing down more cables, I'd have to disengage my new cable from their 300' snake run before it gets hauled away, anyway. I was hoping to find a "better" way, with fewer cables and maybe get a cleaner signal to boot.

If there was a way to do it, I'd have done away with ALL cables long ago. I've been moaning and groaning about cables as far back as when I played guitar in bands and even more so when I started recording and playing guitar at the same time.. ugh! I can't stand getting tangled up in guitar and headphone lines, while trying to hold on to creative energy.... It can't be helped, I suppose, when the two loves of your life are so intimately entangled.

[Mattseymour]

What I have done, and works well, is use ubiquiti networks nanobridges to create a point to point network link and then carry the audio over low latency rtp. There are various ways to do this. Many radio stations are using kit like the comrex access so they're used to live links over ip.

This is expensive though, so they way I did it was to use vlc. Two old laptops running Linux, one to encode the stream and an old netbook at the other end to decode. The ubiquiti nanobridge will quickly and easily give you a reliable 80-100mb/s over about a mile so you can use a high bit rate and low latency settings. You can even get away with a raspberry pi at the remote end, but I haven't tried that myself.

The advantage is it's all digital, wireless and really very reliable. There's potentially more setup time (Although the nanobridges are very easy to setup) and there's no doubt it's more complicated but if you stick Linux on both ends it can be very reliable.

I've used a setup like this across a county show ground to bring a wireless receiver into the ob van. If you have a good line of sight between you and the radio tent it's worth a try.