Tech Notes from the Field

The Dante enabled mic preamps arrived! As the title says, I am trying out the Shure ANI4IN-XLR. The concept was to find a device that was budget friendly as we are really in a test stage as we mentioned in the last post. Here we take the proof of concept to a fully operational installation. I have two Symetrix Radius NX units with Dante, I purchased two Shure ANI4IN units. I designated four production rooms to use one Radius, and three production rooms for the other unit. Let the fun begin!

As all the proof of concepts worked, don’t tell anyone, but I purchased two Dante enabled mic preamps. Of course cost was a consideration for such a feat, so after research, the unit I decided on is the Shure ANI4IN, as mentioned. This is the point were the full concept is deployed with two production studios with the future laid out for the other rooms as the old mic preamps die. Since all the legwork was discussed earlier, this is one short little article.

The Shure device is an input device only, so it is quite interesting to see it only in the Transmitter side of life, especially after training ones mind for Receive. Yet, since we only really concern ourselves with receive, it makes sense. How was that for a circuitous thought? I may need more coffee. The devices require power over ethernet (PoE) which concerns me a bit, but made it easy to install, especially since our switch used has PoE enabled. The preamp give me the ability to assign names for each transmit channel, allows for phantom power (required for me), mic gain range with trim, and even processing if one needs it. All is configured through the web GUI.

On the Symetrix side I could have the Radius NX manage the subscriptions, but to be consistent with our plant, I have Dante Controller managing all subscriptions at this time. I have tested the Radius managing and it works well, so in the future as devices become more intelligent I may start doing this sort of thing. Once the subscriptions were made, I had audio passing and it was time to fine tune gain structure and processing. Working in the DSP world, the gain structure has been a bit of a challenge. I spent some time adjusting the initial input gain. I ran into this with the proof of concept installs, and the original Radius NX installation. Once the input gain was dialed in, and the processing DSP was set, I as curious about the latency. On average the receive latency on the Radius NX from the Shure ANI4IN is only 375 usec. You see that? Microseconds. The receive latency, on average, on the SAS Bravo from the Radius NX is only 354 usec. Needless to say, latency is not an issue. What I really should do is do a test setup to measure the latency from input to output with all the DSP in use, but since I do not notice it, and no users have mentioned it, the need is not necessary. I consider this a success.

Needless to say, not everything was as smooth sailing as it appears. This was due to me overlooking the obvious when installing the Shure. The big “DOH” moment came after spending a bit of time, and emails, wondering why the subscriptions did not stick, and random anomalies with Dante Controller even noticing the devices were online. What made it more baffling, and a good thing, was audio was passing with out an issue. So after a swift kick to my head by a second set of eyes, I overlooked the fact that the Shure ANI has two configurations under network settings; one for control, and one for Dante. I stupidly assigned the same IP address to each! Don’t do that! We all have our moments, right? Once resolved all fell into place accordingly. Lesson learned, once again, to always check your work.

As I move forward I am going to keep my eyes open for various, cost effective mic preamps. Four production rooms will need a solution, so I may have reason to test others, but I am very satisfied with the Shure ANI4IN. There you go, a short end to the mic preamp conundrum which some of us face in this modern era.

Till some other odd topic, or if you have a suggestion, drop a line. Cheers!