AoIP Advocates AES Snag Technical Emmy

NEW YORK—The Audio Engineering Society will receive a Technical & Engineering Emmy Award for its work with audio over IP, sharing the award with six partners who were involved in developing the AES67 standard: ALC NetworX, Audinate, Kevin Gross, QSC, Telos Alliance and Wheatstone.

The award is for “Development of synchronized multichannel uncompressed audio transport over IP networks,” and will be given in a ceremony at the NAB Show at the Wynn Encore on Sunday, April 19. The Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards actually are given for developments or standardization in engineering technologies that affect television.

AES67 is a protocol that established a standardized language for audio transport. AES noted that its AES67 standard for high-performance streaming audio-over-IP interoperability was introduced in 2013. It stated: “AES67 compliance allows audio content interoperability between the proprietary IP-based audio networking protocols developed by the Emmy co-winners: RAVENNA, Dante, Q-Sys, Livewire+ and WheatNet-IP.”

AES Fellow Kevin Gross led the AES67 Standards effort and is the chair of the AES Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems.

In the AES announcement of the award, Gross was quoted: “The improvement from audio networking born in the mid-1990s to new IP-based solutions emerged as a simultaneous invention from the honored companies. While collectively this represented a technical improvement, interoperability was not addressed until the AES initiated the X192 project on audio interoperability.”

He thanked the late Steve Church, Rich Zwiebel, Philip Lawo and Andreas Hildebrand as leaders of companies who “understood the potential for a standard to take audio networking to the next level,” and thanked then AES Standards Manager Mark Yonge for mentoring the process.

AES Executive Director Colleen Harper said AES67 “fundamentally changed the broadcast audio landscape and paved the way for recent similar developments for video.”