I was playing at a festival on the weekend. Watching some the other acts, i was blown away by the quality of the sound system (as well as the beautiful music), so I looked at the boxes and saw they were Meyer Audio. Visiting their website I found out about Milan AV.
I was wondering what experiences people involved in this field had had, and if this may mean Linux can finally come in as a viable option. Although its early days, do you think this be another case a case of the proprietary solutions which currently monopolise this market using vendor lock in to maintain their dominance, or are they now moving towards standardisation and interoperability?
So Milan is a form of AVB. Really an evolution of it. It also had little to do with the quality of audio you heard, which had more to do with the skill of the operators, the tuning and design of the system, and of course the quality of components (Meyer is one of my top two speaker manufacturers personally).
Thing is AVB requires hardware support for specific things that not all switches have and even not all NICs. As a result, you need to make sure the hardware you have, from the NIC to the outputs, all support AVB and specifically Milan. This requires a lot of investment to get right. For a w hole Mac computers supported AVB out of the box, but they were the rarity, and I am not even sure they do it correctly these days.
All that being said, I also find configuration and setup of Milan much more of a pain than competitors like Dante, which Dante doesn’t require specific network hardware in most cases. And good luck getting the two talking to each other, even though AES67 exists. I have run one system that had to get Dante and Milan talking (Yamaha consoles, Meyer speaker processing and speakers), and the only way I was able to do it after speaking with Meyer was to actually break common sense in digital audio and have two separate clocks. There are some specific boxes to allow that interoperability now, but I haven’t tested them myself yet.
Now in terms of Linux support, if you can meet all the hardware requirements I mentioned above, then theoretically you can get AVB running on Linux, I haven’t tried though and the last I looked into it was years ago (Meaning before Milan existed IIRC), at that time it was more a proof of concept than dependable system. Hopefully it has improved by now, but given all the caveats above, I just am not sure it is worth it for most people. I guess it could depend on what exactly you are trying to accomplish with this?
By the way not advocating for Dante in this instance, just giving comparisons on that. Dante on Linux is an entire topic on its own and is still proprietary in its nature. I suspect if I was building from the ground up for this purpose I would probably look at Ravenna and/or AES67 these days honestly.
@Seablade. Thank you for this most in depth explanation. There’s a lot of
detail in there. It sounds like it would be wise to wait before jumping
into any expensive projects!