The OCA Alliance, the AV trade association that promotes awareness and implementation of the AES70 open network control standard, was showing the offerings of some of its members on its ISE stand. Among new Alliance member Your Audio Systems’ Orchestra, a platform for building Linux-based AES67/AES70 professional audio devices. Also on show were development tools to demonstrate the multiple facets of AES70.
“In addition to promoting the new members and new products, we’re also continuing to promote some of the technical resources that we’ve made available,” said Alliance spokesperson Ethan Wetzell (pictured), Bosch Security Systems’ engineering core platform strategist.
Speaking to the ISE Daily, Wetzell commented: “I’ve been walking around the show floor and I’ve seen a couple of stands advertising AES70 implementation from manufacturers I’ve never heard of, or met before, which is always a treat. When people are able to pick up the technology and the specification and begin to implement it on their own, you know it’s beginning to actually propagate. That’s been a very positive thing.”
AES70 can be used in conjunction with any available transport protocol (such as Dante, AVB, AES67 or CobraNet). Offering interoperability across different media transports and manufacturers’ devices, it enables complex system integration and options as to how and where network devices can be deployed.
“One thing I’ve noted over the past 12 months is that questions (about AES70) are no longer about what it is, and are shifting to ‘How do I use it? How can I find it? What are some resources that are available?’” said Wetzell.
On the final day of ISE 2018, Wetzell gave a presentation at the AVIXA Commercial Solutions Theatre (sponsored by Crestron) addressing the difference between a protocol, a standard and a solution, and how those different things build on each other. “There is legitimately a lot of confusion about how people look at the alphabet soup of trade associations, technology components and manufacturers and actually make honest comparisons on what they should choose,” he told us.
