Why is there no Toslink 2.0?

[abdo123]

I mean Toslink is the most versatile and effective method of digital audio transport even in 2021.

It can support long distances with zero hiccups, while HDMI and USB suffers terribly beyond 3 meters.

It effectively interrupts ground loops. And prevents noise leakage from other electrical circuits.

There are no ‘physical’ data transmission limitations as optical transmission is the fastest and the most stable humans have come up with.

Was the pro Audio world just satisfied with their man-sized AES / XLR cables?

 

[McFly]

There is a limitation, especially in the pro sector. Stand on or exceed bending radii and that optical cables toast. So they stick to AES in pro purely for reliability.

In domestic, toslink does have a distance limitation however while not as bad as coaxial or hdmi, it is largely dependent on the cable quality. The cables are not true fibre optic but more of a plastic based material to give them a better bending radius and durability, at the cost of some transmission loss. I wouldn’t go further than 15m. Use a quality cable manufacturer.

Yes, sure, use true fibre optic and quality optical converters you could get kilometres of signal transmission. But because true fibre optic cannot be used in home because people would keep breaking the cable, the manufactures use cheap optical converters. This results in...

Jitter. Whether audible or not, I don’t know. But it’s usually there in spades compared to aes or coaxial. I could be proven wrong here I am sure someone will. Fine for TV and HT use imo

I agree re ground loops. Very effective here for TV to AVR
Noise leakage is still possible if poor circuit design around the optical converters is poor.

I think USB and HDMI suffer from volt drop.

all IMO, of course. I use a 15m toslink from my tv to my dacs, and I do hear the occasional pop which I am unable to rule out as being a content, source or cable distance problem.

I had no other option in my install. It works quite well. It will be around for a while yet, until replaced by wireless. Cant get ground loops going wireless, right?

 

[RayDunzl]

There are no ‘physical’ data transmission limitations

I wouldn't say that, but the requirements for audio can be handily exceeded.

As for "Toslink 2.0", there is higher-speed and bi-directional Toslink in the Toshiba Catalog:

https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/list/index.php?code=param_407&region=nsca&lang=en_us

 

[voodooless]

What should the specifications of Toslink 2.0 be then?

The simple answer as to why it doesn't exist is really DRM. Nowadays they won't give you access to multichannel high resolution, high sample rate digital audio data directly.

And what about ADAT?

 

[wesslen]

The pro world has ADAT and MADI which are both more capable (MADI especially), also Dante.

Edit: Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT_Lightpipe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MADI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_(networking)

 

[chelgrian]

What should the specifications of Toslink 2.0 be then?

The simple answer as to why it doesn't exist is really DRM. Nowadays they won't give you access to multichannel high resolution, high sample rate digital audio data directly.

And what about ADAT?

The Pro Audio world moved on to a combination of MADI over either coax or optical transports

https://www.installation-international.com/case-studies/audio-networking-still-going-mad-for-madi

more recently audio over IP such as Dante by Audinate.

https://www.audinate.com/

SMUX which is the multichannel over TOSLINK connectors is dying because you can only do 4 channels at 24bit/96KHz.

As noted the content industry are so paranoid that they refuse to allow audio across open digital formats anymore so you are stuck with HDMI, Meridian did have a go at producing a DRMed Ethernet based link but it didn't go anywhere

 

[kipman725]

Dante is now dominant in pro but has quite high per device implmentation costs to the point that a lot of even high end multi thousand $ devices are sold as a Dante and non-Dante version or use a (relatively expensive) addon card to provide the Dante connection. For consumer stuff its more liklley a wireless standard: https://www.wisaassociation.org/

 

[voodooless]

Don't forget AVB, which for instance some of the Mutu interfaces integrate.

For consumer stuff its more liklley a wireless standard: https://www.wisaassociation.org/

Too bad, there aren't any dedicated WiSa receivers yet. Would be fun to create some DIY wireless speakers. Hypex should have a module for their Fusion amps! edit: I was wrong: there is a receiver. No digital audio though, proprietary connector, and not cheap.

 

[michaelahess]

Why does Dante even exist? It's just ethernet with their own transport/codec? Seems superfluous to the MANY existing codec's and transports we already have for ethernet (IP).

I'm a 25 year network engineer, I know the limits of ethernet. Audio and video don't even come CLOSE to straining an IP network built with consumer grade gear.

Money grab is all I can think.

Jitter? Why does this still come up? The gear on either end sends then buffers before processing. There is no jitter in the end result. Dropout are the only possible downside of failed partial transmission. Again this is from my knowledge of fiber optic networks (I engineered multi-state cell backhaul) and ethernet. Maybe Toslink is different?

 

[goldenpiggy]

Why does Dante even exist? It's just ethernet with their own transport/codec? Seems superfluous to the MANY existing codec's and transports we already have for ethernet (IP).

I'm a 25 year network engineer, I know the limits of ethernet. Audio and video don't even come CLOSE to straining an IP network built with consumer grade gear.

Money grab is all I can think.

Jitter? Why does this still come up? The gear on either end sends then buffers before processing. There is no jitter in the end result. Dropout are the only possible downside of failed partial transmission. Again this is from my knowledge of fiber optic networks (I engineered multi-state cell backhaul) and ethernet. Maybe Toslink is different?

Dante exists because:
1) It allows interoperability between different manufacturers' components. I can feed a few Sennheiser 2x2 ceiling tile mics or 32 Shure wireless gooseneck into a Yamaha mixer that drives a QSC power amp with a $100 switch.

2) CAT6 cable is dirt cheap (especially when you have to use plenum stuff), goes just as long as 110 Ohm AES/EBU, is easier to pull/terminate, and support a ton of simultaneous channels on a single cable.

3) It has become the de facto digital audio distribution standard for not only installs, but live sound.

You'd be wrong about the limits of ethernet -- I can easily max out a gigabit pipe with 8 NDI PTZ cameras going at once. SDVOE requires 10G.

 

[Matias]

Why does Dante even exist? It's just ethernet with their own transport/codec? Seems superfluous to the MANY existing codec's and transports we already have for ethernet (IP).

I think it makes a lot of sense if you think BIG. Like a mixing desk in a large venue (left island in the picture below), sending signal to the PA speakers around the stage. Transmitting digital audio through cheap ethernet cables for hundreds of meters seems very interesting in this situation.

 

[michaelahess]

1) That's literally the point of ethernet, why recreate the wheel?
2) Agree 100%, ethernet, not Dante tech.
3) I never said 1Gb as a limit, I turned up 100Gb for many projects, the cost of that for this kind of equipment isn't even bad. Cat6 at 10Gb has serious electrical and distance limitations anyway, so I don't see the advantage there, that's what fiber is for.

 

[kipman725]

I'm not an expert but the difficulties seem to lie in guaranteed and deterministic latency so the buffers have to be quite small. Dante requires at least 1Gb/s wired network. I have used the older audio over IP tech Cobranet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CobraNet and despite getting audio output had full scale glitching issues every few minutes that I was never able to resolve with the hardware I had so I wouldn't underestimate that Dante just seems to work and have good interoperability.

A typical live sound application of audio over IP is to replace the multicore cable from the stage to the mixing desk and back to the stage to drive the PA. These multicores are massive thick beasts that constantly break so replacing them with ethernet is very compelling even for small scale stuff.

 

[michaelahess]

I think it makes a lot of sense if you think BIG. Like a mixing desk in a large venue (left island in the picture below), sending signal to the PA speakers around the stage. Transmitting digital audio through cheap ethernet cables for hundreds of meters seems very interesting in this situation.

View attachment 122554

Again, this is literally what ethernet does. Why have a separate thing on top of it? PHY's are cheap as dirt, you don't need add-on stuff, just good programmers.

 

[michaelahess]

I'm not an expert but the difficulties seem to lie in guaranteed and deterministic latency so the buffers have to be quite small. Dante requires at least 1Gb/s wired network. I have used the older audio over IP tech Cobranet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CobraNet and despite getting audio output had full scale glitching issues every few minutes that I was never able to resolve with the hardware I had so I wouldn't underestimate that Dante just seems to work and have good interoperability.

This is a good answer. Maybe they are using something different than TCP or UDP, it's still on an IP network though, so I can't imagine a properly implemented TCP stack would not work fine, and it's free. UDP will inherently have dropouts during peak usage, TCP will not, and the time delay is a non issue for something like this that would be on it's own dedicated network. Not like you're going to have a lot of broadcast storms...

 

[michaelahess]

Another point to the thinking big...I had to meet Verizon standards for latency, across thousands of miles. All for audio and video transmission. I know a thing or two about measuring to the pico second. No venue is even remotely close to struggling with this.

 

[kipman725]

Well you can do Dante over a normal network card (unlike Cobranet which is a layer 1 protocol) so it must be using standard Layer 1 protocols:
https://www.audinate.com/products/software/dante-virtual-soundcard?force=true

 

[michaelahess]

Well you can do Dante over a normal network card (unlike Cobranet which is a layer 1 protocol) so it must be using standard Layer 1 protocols:
https://www.audinate.com/products/software/dante-virtual-soundcard?force=true

Yeah, that's the ONE reason I doubt it's significance from a technical standpoint. Sure, it might make discovery easier with their own protocol or something, but otherwise, I'd curious WHY it's so ubiquitous.

 

[kipman725]

Yeah, that's the ONE reason I doubt it's significance from a technical standpoint. Sure, it might make discovery easier with their own protocol or something, but otherwise, I'd curious WHY it's so ubiquitous.

You might want to look into this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES67

ubiquity seems to be because it became the most dominent (marketing) and then there is presure for everyone to support the same standard. As you can see from the wikipedia article above there are many simlar standards that failed to get as widespread adoption. The previous standards like Cobranet had significant limitations which cased people to switch. No one makes Cobranet gear anymore.

 

[goldenpiggy]

You're correct about the auto-discovery, and it is super easy to configure ( literally a matrix of inputs and outputs from every Dante device on the subnet). Yes, it's due to the custom chipset in Dante devices, which ain't cheap.

The latency in live sound IP audio is a result of codecs and DSP processing, not so much data transmission. A typical digital wireless mic has 2-3ms of latency with its 48KHz sampling rate and the VSELP encoding. A rider-grade digital mixer probably has 1-2ms latency input to output. You'll have additional latency from a digital snake from stage to FOH. Audio then has to go to the amplifiers which likely have their own internal DSP/processing -- chalk up another millisecond or so there. So by the time it's all said and done, you could be looking at 8-10msec latency, which is definitely a problem for musicians that rely on monitors and IEMs.