Introducing A2B – A Low-Latency Digital Audio Bus Standard

Presenters:
Joseph Beauchemin, Analog Devices
Denis Labrecque, DeLab Consulting - Half Moon Bay, CA, USA

A2B is a de-facto digital audio communication standard developed to input and deliver deterministic, very low latency (< 50 microseconds) audio across multiple nodes. Multiple microphone arrays and speakers can be connected to the same daisy-chained unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) wires carrying both digital microphone and I2S/TDM audio signals (up to 32 channels), as well as control information and bus power. This presentation will explain the capabilities of A2B and how it works, illustrating how the low-latency A2B bus enables new applications like simplified multichannel pickup cabling and other multichannel digital I/O for music instruments/effects, as well as mixing consoles, robotics applications, and more. The presentation will also demonstrate how easy it is to use the A2B bus to bidirectionally transmit synchronous audio data (I2S/TDM-to-I2S/TDM) and control/status information (I2C-to-I2C) across multiple bus nodes in an A2B system.