What Audio Engineers Need to Know about Media Networks

Presenter:
Patrick Killianey, Audinate - Buena Park, CA, USA

Everything in our industry is going to IP. It isn’t just audio – video, lighting, control, and intercom are there as well. This session forms a great base networking skill for anyone in live sound or media production. If you’re comfortable setting up a home network and joining a WiFi hotspot at Starbucks, then this session will launch you comfortably to an intermediate-level user.

By the end of this session, you’ll have the concepts to structurally design a medium sized network for an installation, recording studio or live production. You’ll also have the basic terminology to interact with an IT department, as needed.

This session will be taught by Patrick Killianey from Audinate. Patrick produced a YouTube video series called “Network Fundamentals for Professional Audio” which has become part of the curriculum in college programs towards IT and audio production alike. This live variant of this class will review the key pieces of that video series and chart new territory. We’ll refocus on key concepts on Subnet Mask, Gateway, Reserved LAN ranges, IP addresses to avoid, DNS and DHCP. From there, we’ll add on common structural topics in audio designs like trunk lines, VLANs and VLAN tagging, Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs), non-blocking backplane architecture, and basics of fiber.