gigaACE

showstack / protocols / gigaace

Allen & Heath's point-to-point audio and control link, carrying 128 bidirectional channels plus control between a dLive surface and its MixRack over a single Cat5e cable or fibre.

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: 96 kHz
Audio channels: up to 128

Audio: 128 channels each way at the dLive signal path's native 96 kHz. Transport latency is quoted in samples rather than milliseconds — about five, or 52 µs — which is the honest unit for a link whose delay scales with the clock, and small enough that the converters either end dominate the budget.

What goes wrong

It uses Ethernet cabling and connectors and is not Ethernet. Patching gigaACE into a network switch does nothing useful and can confuse the switch.

Because all the audio lives in the MixRack, the gigaACE link can drop and the show keeps making sound. That is a genuine design advantage and worth knowing before you panic.

Typical use

Linking a dLive surface to its MixRack
Extending a console to a stage rack over fibre
Redundant surface-to-rack connection

Sources

Allen & Heath — Allen & Heath 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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