Private Cinema & the Advantages of Active Speakers

Private cinema and the advantages of active speakers.

Imagine a passive speaker placed in a home theater where the amplifier is installed in a rack and long speaker wires, usually between 10m (33ft) and often up to 50m (165ft), drive the speaker all adding up to the losses, not to mention the passive crossover inside the speaker, which combined can sometimes eat up to 50% of the power.

Not only is power destroyed, but also control due to high resistance, capacitance, and inductance. Even the best passive speakers suffer from this.

The active speaker design principle offers benefits over the passive design. If the amplifiers are built into the speaker:

• Each transducer is driven by its optimized amplifier. The built-in digital electronic crossover allows splitting the audio signal into separate frequencies that are sent to the individual power amplifiers, which are connected by short speaker cables to specific transducers optimized for this frequency band. Each driver-specific power amplifier then sees only a limited frequency range because the power amplifier is placed after the active crossover, sometimes the amplifier designs are optimized for this band.
• This design leads to a reduced power requirement for each amplifier channel. Our active speaker design offers up to 3dB more acoustic output power. This is not the only improvement; the transient response of the system is enhanced dramatically by compensating transducer-specific anomalies, enclosure-related effects, and overall phase-related problems not possible to adjust in passive speakers. Plus the fact that there is sophisticated protection circuitry for each drive unit and amplifier channel, not present in passive speakers.
• There are also active speakers with external amplifiers installed in racks. Those active speakers also have certain benefits over passive designs because the passive crossover is lost, and the speaker wire quality & length used, play a significant role here.

Audio over IP (AoIP)

What is Audio over IP?

AoIP is a network protocol that allows us to send high-quality digital audio signals over an IP network.

All devices in the network must be able to speak and listen to the chosen protocols.

In 2022, it becomes clear that a small handful of protocols seem to succeed. In Pro Audio, there are two main groups, the proprietary Dante protocol by Audinate and the open source AVB / Milan group supported by industry heavyweights such as Meyer Sound, d&amp, B audiotachnik, L-Acoustics, Neutrik, Biamp, SAVANT, and more.

Then there is AES67 which is by definition not an Audio over IP protocol but guarantees a minimum set of interoperability between different protocols. AES67 rides on top of other protocols such as Ravenna, Dante, and Audio Video Bridging (AVB).

Ascendo is the first consumer brand to deploy and support, since 2014, the AVB Protocol, for the following reasons:

AVB / Milan combines precise, consistent time synchronization technology with automatic network traffic management that gives priority to audio and video signals on the entire network.

AVB standards add capabilities to the network providing three major enhancements:

1. Precise timing to support low-jitter media clocks and accurate synchronization of multiple audio streams.
2. A simple reservation protocol that allows an application on an endpoint device (speaker) to notify the various network elements in a path so that they can reserve the resources necessary to support a particular media stream; and,
3. Queuing and forwarding rules that ensure that such a media stream will pass through the network within the delay specified by the reservation.?

Adding on top of the pure audio transport the real-time control and command option to control literally all the millions of device parameters in the network in real-time in the user interface. We manage to connect and set up large theater systems with high channel counts reliably and fast.

We developed, together with Storm Audio, the first fully AVB-based digital and networked theater system.

We rely on source devices, such as surround decoders, to send the dedicated signals into the network. There is only a couple of AoIP processors available today. Both support Dante. This is one of the reasons, why Ascendo also adopted to introduce, in 2021, Dante speaking amplifiers for their speakers as well as Dante Input & Output audio interfaces for legacy amplifiers.

Want to know more about Ascendo Immersive Audio speakers? Want to have a private conversation about your project? Simply reach out to us at [email protected]

ASCENDO IMMERSIVE AUDIO?- Redefining Expectations

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