DCS Should back into the network server market

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@PAR

It looks like Chord have bought the rights to use the name.

Correct, they did.

[TheFlash (Nigel of Reiki Audio)]

@AndrewS

The layered nature of communications protocols and the fact that a given connection can be synchronous at a certain level and asynchronous at another can and does cause real confusion for customers. Network jitter and audio jitter are not the same thing and the way we clock audio over asynchronous connections means that there is no possible causal relationship between the two. I have seen marketing for some network products that tries to relate or even equate the two.

And, it would appear, for a good number of manufacturers.

[Anupc (Anup)]

@AndrewS

whether ethernet itself is synchronous or asynchronous is not so back-and-white. Ethernet has a speed/bandwidth, which means it must be synchronous in some respect.

It’s actually quite black and white, albeit potentially confusing

At the physical layer, Ethernet’s bursty electrical signals are synchronous in how they’re sent and received. However, the data link layer that frames those electrical signals into “protocol-data-units” is asynchronous - a key enabler for error-detection and retransmission - along with the network layer that frame those PDUs into Packets, and the rest of the OSI stack above that.

To confuse matters further, there’s a slightly separate technology specifically known as Synchronous Ethernet (ITU-T G.8261) which extends the synchronous physical layer across an entire wide-area Ethernet network.

Abbreviated as “SyncE”, it’s commonly deployed across 5G Metro Wide-Area-Networks. They’re built on a different chipset then normal Ethernet Switches, and typically have GNSS & 10MHz Clocking ports, known as BITS interfaces (those gold pins on the Cisco ASR920 below for example), for connection to GPS receivers.

That’s not to be confused with “Audiophile” Ethernet Switches which have an external 10MHz BNC Clock interface though, like the EtherRegen or the Silent Angel N8, those are NOT SyncE capable or compliant. They merely use the Clock input to generate the required internal 25MHz clock for the Ethernet chipset, which is an entirely unnecessary exercise.

And then there’s Ethernet-TSN (Time Sensitive Networking), which the Professional audio/video industry adopted as part of their Audio-Video-Bridging (AVB) family of technologies prior to AES67 (and SMPTE-2110) making an appearance which instead relies on Precision Time Protocol (PTPv2) instead of TSN…

Ethernet Timing is a rabbit hole that goes very very deep… dCS skipped all that complication when they invented Tomix for the Varèse.

[Anupc (Anup)]

@PAR

Who is the original manufacturer of the Silent Angel switch?

Thunder-Data - http://thunder-data.cn/en/aboutus/15790.html

[keiserrg]

@AndrewS

Audio over ethernet, which is what we are talking about here, but which in is in fact just one of hundreds of applications that use ethernet as an underlying transport, is asynchronous as you point out**.

Agreed and exactly. And this is why using a precision clock to “clock” an Ethernet signal, as this switch manufacturer claims to do, makes no sense!