INTRODUCTION: Overview
RAVE™ Digital Audio Router products provide a means of transporting CobraNet™ audio signals over a Fast Ethernet network. Using standard network hardware and physical me- dia, a RAVE system has a maximum capacity of 64 audio chan- nels on a 100BASE-TX repeater segment and the ability to support hundreds of audio channels on a switched Ethernet LAN. RAVE transports the audio signals over the network in a standard uncompressed 48 kHz digital format in resolutions of 16, 20 or 24-bit. Additionally, RAVE products support op- eration in stand-alone mode, requiring minimal front-panel setup, or in software mode, utilizing off-the-shelf applications implementing the Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP.
A RAVE system handles routing in bundles of up to 8 indi- vidual audio channels. Each RAVE supports up to two bundles of audio. The availability of audio through network transmis- sion or reception is dependent on the RAVE model. The 88s
and 188s-24 can both receive and transmit data over the net- work and can support higher capacity configurations when setup through the Management Interface using SNMP.
Each RAVE unit has a female RJ-45 Ethernet connector on its rear panel for connecting to a standard Category 5 Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) cable. For economy and flexibility, RAVE utilizes standard off-the-shelf Fast Ethernet devices such as repeaters, switches and fiber optic media converters. You need at least two RAVE devices—one to send and one to receive, or two that operate bi-directionally—to route audio over an Ethernet network. There are currently six RAVE models, with three basic send/receive configurations (16 channels send, 16 channels receive, or 8 channels send/8 channels receive). Each of these configurations is available with either analog or digital AES3 (often called AES/EBU) audio inputs and out- puts. The six models are listed in the table below:
NOTE! Many instances of RAVE model numbers, as presented in this manual, have had the suffix (“s” or “s-24” ) removed for clarity and ease of reading.
