Something wonderful just occurred to me that I will try out at the first opportunity. But perhaps someone here has tested it already.
If anyone here is used to corporate events, then you will be familiar with situations where the client needs audio output from x number of laptops situated both on stage and near FOH. Often connected to a VGA cable at the same time. If its a mac the VGA/minijack combo is almost a hum guarantee. So each laptop equals two transformer isolated DI boxes, two XLR cables, and ,more often than not, an unreliable minijack to phono/tsr/xlr cable.
Well, with a Dante card installed one coud simply install DVS (7day version) on each laptop and all you would need is a gigabit switch and some network cables. Two channels of audio coming from each laptop over Dante is negligable.
Has anyone tried this? It sounds too good to be true [:p]
USB DI with generic interface, such as those sold by ARX, is a much simpler solution!
We use them all the time on Windows and Mac laptops here for situations like yours and not had a problem yet. Transformer/DI functionality built-in, and sounds a lot cleaner too. We either use a Y-split cable to join L&R outputs into one mono XLR run, or just a pair of XLR out to the IDR. 2-way multicore cables are out there too, which might keep things neater.
Agreed, and the limitations on DVC in terms of what will travel down the line are too restrictive (I haven’t had any luck with Windows Media Player or iTunes), the ARX boxes are a great bit of kit, but for even less money the ART USB dual pre works a treat too!
Ah, I reach too far. My goal is to have IDR stageside and run everything between stage and FOH over Cat cable. Hence the desire to eliminate any regular audio connections on the FOH side. I have no analog IO on that side and would love to keep it that way. Otherwise the Arx would indeed be a great solution.
Lieven you have a point about installing on someone elses laptop, although most of the laptops tend to be macbook pros from the event company I work for.
Biggsounds, I am saddened to hear that windows system audio is not playing well with DVS, any experience with systemaudio on mac?
Sorry I’m not a Mac person so I can’t comment on media players - one compromise may be a stereo USB interface as mentioned above on both the client PC & yours, run out of one into the other, THEN tunnel the audio down DVC (and an appropriate ASIO compatible program) to your iDR rack… convoluted I know, but probably still cleaner than the old way!
Ah dear old Radial engineering for me on that score, if all else fails you can use the Di box to beat the client into submission as they are made from old Panzer Tanks I feel sure.[} ]
Sadly Biggsounds, Radial seem to be expensive everywhere which is a shame, still I guess you get what you pay for and I have not managed to break one yet.[ ]
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