Questions on design...

Robert Olson olson at mcs.anl.gov
Tue Apr 25 20:47:44 CDT 2000


>1. Can the AG control workstation share control of the Gentner with a
>Crestron or AMX system? Is the "control computer" used for anything other
>then control of the Gentner/audio mixing? If we are using Crestron or AMX
>could we use that in place of the current control software?

The plan for the control computer is that it'll switch over to being a 
Linux box when we get Gentner control software that doesn't require Windows 
(this likely means that we'll be writing some... protocol is very well 
defined by the Gentner documentation). Then we can do things like gate rat 
transmission based on Gentner mic gating.

We also plan to move control of the display machine to this box, doing 
things like video layout, tool startup, and the like remotely. Ideally we 
would control the whole node from the one machine so that we can quit the 
switching back and forth that is currently necessary.

(I envision an audio control panel that has a row of controls, one per mic, 
with level meter and gain adjustment. It'd also have a row of controls, one 
per remote source, again with a level meter and gain adjustment. This 
application would be the merging of the Gentner controller with remote 
control/monitoring of the rat running on the audio box. All eminently 
doable, just requires time to build it).

>2. Is the Gentner a capable overall mixer, or would we still need a Mackie
>mixer for more generic use of the room.

Depends on what you're doing. All your microphones will have to go directly 
into the Gentner no matter what, so that echo cancellation and ambient 
noise detection work properly. The Gentner has a number of other inputs (I 
think 4 more line level inputs, and 8 outputs on the AP400. The audio box 
takes one input and output, or two for stereo (that we want to support at 
some point, and the speakers take one or two outputs.

>In the agspecs-new-colored.ppt document it lists: Mackie, Biamp, Intelix,
>and Voicecrafter.  From my reading of the Gentner literature, it claims to
>do all of this - true?  (We will probably add a Mackie in anyway, so we can
>mix in what ever comes up a little easier, but I was wondering if it was
>necessary.)

Wow, I forgot about those slides :-). The gentner pretty much rolls the 
functionality of all those boxes up into one box.

As far as adding a Mackie, that'd be fine in the mixed-purpose room. The 
way I'd use it is to connect its output to a Gentner input, and mix it into 
the speakers with the Gentner. I'm curious if this is sufficient for your 
purposes.

Also wrt general purpose use, Gentner sells an IR remote control for the AP 
boxes. I'm not sure how it'd play with AG control stuff, however, since I 
think the IR receiver plugs into the Gentner serial control port.

>3. Is the telephone interface used much for AG?

In the current network environment, we use it fairly frequently to patch 
around lossy network (which causes great badness with the audio).

>The AP800 has some appeal
>over the AP400 because of the additional inputs and outputs, but you loose
>the telephone interface.

You can fix this two ways. If you want a *lot* of in/out, you can cable the 
AP800 to an AP400 and gain four more mics, a bunch of I/O, and the 
telephone interface. You can also cable in an AP10 which is just the 
telephone interface.

By cable in, I mean the gentner private digital bus, which provides a 
couple internal mixing buses for traffic between boxes.

Hope this helps,
--bob
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