Aviom A-Net

showstack / protocols / aviom-a-net

Proprietary digital audio distribution for personal monitor mixing: a rack sends a fixed set of channels down Cat5 to personal mixers on stage, where each musician builds their own mix locally.

Audio transportProprietaryReported

Media Large, continuous, on time and in order

Continuous streams that are large enough to be sized properly, and that must arrive in order and on time.

What kills it. Anything that starves the link — usually a management transfer nobody scheduled — and jitter that outruns the receive buffer.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

What it carries

Sample rates: 48 kHz
Audio bit depth: 24-bit
Audio channels: up to 16
Audio encoding: Linear PCM over Cat5, layer 1 rather than Ethernet

Audio: 16 channels is the Pro16 personal-monitor system almost everyone means by A-Net. Pro64 is a separate, incompatible family carrying up to 64 at higher rates; the connectors look identical and the two do not talk.

What goes wrong

A-Net runs on Cat5 and is not Ethernet. It must not be patched into a network switch, and the cable run limits are stricter than networking habits suggest.

The channel set is fixed at the source. A musician can only mix what the engineer sent, so the channel allocation is a rehearsal decision, not a soundcheck one.

Pro16 and Pro64 are two different A-Net generations with different capabilities. Mixing them requires a converter, not just a cable.

Typical use

Personal monitor mixing for a band
Houses of worship where musicians mix themselves
Reducing monitor engineer workload on stage

Sources

Aviom — Aviom primary

Understand the mechanism

Show networks Numbers that stand for signals

Something wrong, or missing?

Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, first_published, implementations. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.

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