Cobranet

Silas Pradetto

Silas Pradetto

Graduate Student
Jan 11, 2011
2,130
1
0
Land of Steady Habits
www.concertsunlimited.com
I know Cobranet is an old protocol, but it's the only networked audio protocol that IT-HD amps support. So I ordered an MY16-CII card for my Yamaha board, and I'm preparing to distribute audio to my racks of IT-HD amps via my network. I'm going to be testing this at the shop first, but the first show that I'll be using it at is this Saturday; if possible, I'd like to avoid any issues.

So, does anyone have any tips, tricks, concerns, etc?

Signal flow will be MY card -> gig switch -> 200' cat5 -> 100Mb switch -> amps in rack 1 -> cable to rack 2 -> 100Mb switch -> amps in rack 2
 
Re: Cobranet

Silas Pradetto said:
I know Cobranet is an old protocol, but it's the only networked audio protocol that IT-HD amps support. So I ordered an MY16-CII card for my Yamaha board, and I'm preparing to distribute audio to my racks of IT-HD amps via my network. I'm going to be testing this at the shop first, but the first show that I'll be using it at is this Saturday; if possible, I'd like to avoid any issues.

So, does anyone have any tips, tricks, concerns, etc?

Signal flow will be MY card -> gig switch -> 200' cat5 -> 100Mb switch -> amps in rack 1 -> cable to rack 2 -> 100Mb switch -> amps in rack 2
Click to expand...

Are these managed or unmanaged switches and is there going to be any data traffic of any kind on any of them? Also, do they have auto crossover (called auto-MDIX)? If not, the cables linking the switches together will have to be crossover type cables.

Right now, the only things I can think of are to use high-grade cable for your uplinks with Ethercons and a break out/in panel in each rack, since switches don't support that connector natively. I would prefer cat-6, since it will provide for more bandwidth in the future and little more cost, but at minimum I would recommend cat-5e.

~Jeff
 
Re: Cobranet

They're all unmanaged switches, the minimum spec cable in use will be cat5e (the 200' run), and the racks will be wired with cat6. The only other data on the network will be the control signal for those amplifiers.

They're all auto-uplink switches, and the network has been in use for a while now (just not with Cobranet running on it).

All the amp racks already use Ethercon and I will be making a panel for the console with Ethercon as well. Completely agreed that regular RJ45 connectors are completely unsuitable for anything heavy-duty.

I have a roll of cat6 and I make all my own patch cables with it, so they're all crimped nicely and are all exactly the right length.

Thanks for the info.
 
Re: Cobranet

Silas Pradetto said:
They're all unmanaged switches, the minimum spec cable in use will be cat5e (the 200' run), and the racks will be wired with cat6. The only other data on the network will be the control signal for those amplifiers.

They're all auto-uplink switches, and the network has been in use for a while now (just not with Cobranet running on it).

All the amp racks already use Ethercon and I will be making a panel for the console with Ethercon as well. Completely agreed that regular RJ45 connectors are completely unsuitable for anything heavy-duty.

I have a roll of cat6 and I make all my own patch cables with it, so they're all crimped nicely and are all exactly the right length.

Thanks for the info.
Click to expand...

With unmanaged switches, you won't have to worry about Spanning Tree Protocol (it works to prevent switching loops, but can interfere with audio delivery) or Broadcast Storm Protection (as the name implies, it prevents too many broadcast packets from a host flooding the network, but can stop legitimate audio traffic). However, you will not have the ability to segregate the audio traffic from the data traffic or add QOS to the audio traffic so it gets guaranteed priority.

It sounds like the amount of data traffic will be small, so that may not be a problem without segregation or QOS. I would try it and see if you encounter problems with that. Initially, I would add a hub in between the switches for testing and run Wireshark to see how the traffic is flowing. This won't work on an unmanaged switch, only a hub (if you had a managed switch, you could set one port to mirror all the others for monitoring). Right now, my only concern would be the data traffic messing with the audio traffic.

I would also look into "smart" managed switches. Used, they are not too expensive and would give you a lot more features. Smart switches are simpler than full managed switches and they have a web interface allowing you to manage it with a GUI instead of a command line.

~Jeff
 
Re: Cobranet

Jeff Stevens said:
With unmanaged switches, you won't have to worry about Spanning Tree Protocol (it works to prevent switching loops, but can interfere with audio delivery) or Broadcast Storm Protection (as the name implies, it prevents too many broadcast packets from a host flooding the network, but can stop legitimate audio traffic). However, you will not have the ability to segregate the audio traffic from the data traffic or add QOS to the audio traffic so it gets guaranteed priority.

It sounds like the amount of data traffic will be small, so that may not be a problem without segregation or QOS. I would try it and see if you encounter problems with that. Initially, I would add a hub in between the switches for testing and run Wireshark to see how the traffic is flowing. This won't work on an unmanaged switch, only a hub (if you had a managed switch, you could set one port to mirror all the others for monitoring). Right now, my only concern would be the data traffic messing with the audio traffic.

I would also look into "smart" managed switches. Used, they are not too expensive and would give you a lot more features. Smart switches are simpler than full managed switches and they have a web interface allowing you to manage it with a GUI instead of a command line.

~Jeff
Click to expand...

Some of the "unmanaged" switches are implementing QoS and other features of managed switches, without the ability to disable it...
 
Re: Cobranet

Jeff Stevens said:
That's possibly true about things like Spanning Tree and Broadcast Storm, but I have never encountered one that implemented QoS. How would it know which traffic is higher priority to the end user?

~Jeff
Click to expand...

It's possible that the ones I ran across only implemented Broadcast Storm, but I could have sworn that they also implemented QoS, with some rather obnoxious defaults that couldn't be changed. This is one of the reasons that I try to stay away from midsize unmanaged switches (anything over 8 ports is suspect, IMO).
 
Re: Cobranet

Silas
Have you programmed (set bundles on) the MY16-CII card before? I tried for an hour to program the card with the Yamaha software. It could never find my NIC...I tried everything. I switched to disco and had the thing programmed in 5 minutes.
 
Re: Cobranet

Whatever you do, make sure that the ethernet switches you are using for your CobraNet network are NOT "green" switches that go to a low power mode when they don't sense any data being transferred!! Nothing but headaches! The big giveaway is if you see a green tree symbol printed on the switch, though some manufacturers might mark things differently.
 
Re: Cobranet

David Sturzenbecher said:
Silas
Have you programmed (set bundles on) the MY16-CII card before? I tried for an hour to program the card with the Yamaha software. It could never find my NIC...I tried everything. I switched to disco and had the thing programmed in 5 minutes.
Click to expand...

No, I had never tried. The Yamaha program doesn't see my card either, on win7, unless I run in XP compatibility mode as Administrator. Even then, after it was sort of working, I could not get anything to work. The program kept crashing and I decided it's a piece of crap.

I just downloaded your recommended program and it looks much better. Hope it works this time around!
 
Re: Cobranet

I have audio transmitting. Itech HD amps can only receive audio from a Cobranet network if their internal DSP is set to the same sample rate as the network. That leads me to the next question:

How do I clock the entire network at 96k? This seems to be a configuration issue for the conductor (the MY16-CII), but I can't find any such setting.
 
Re: Cobranet

If you want to run at 96K, understand that your cobranet bundles will have half the channels available. There's only so much you can squeeze in the ethernet pipe for CobraNet. IIRC the sample rate is set in DISCO for the MY16-CII. And of course you need to set the mixing console to 96K in it's menu structure as well.
 
Top Bottom