# 10Gb Ethernet?



## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 21, 2021)

Is it an improvement for streaming audio?

I guess that means VE Pro, since there aren't any other audio over ethernet programs I know of.

Subtext: is it worth spending the extra $100 if you get a new Mac?

TIA


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## twincities (Apr 21, 2021)

in dante (another audio over network protocol) a 1gbe connection will get you 1024 channels at 192khz/32bit. audio is REALLY small when talking about "per second" specs. we're a few years/technologies away from needing 10gbe for purely audio streams.

(i'm not a VEP user so they could utilize it in some way i'm not aware of!)


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## Jeremy Spencer (Apr 21, 2021)

I asked VSL about this when I ordered my new Mac, they said there would be zero benefit.


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## Ben (Apr 21, 2021)

twincities said:


> in dante (another audio over network protocol) a 1gbe connection will get you 1024 channels at 192khz/32bit. audio is REALLY small when talking about "per second" specs. we're a few years/technologies away from needing 10gbe for purely audio streams.


I'm think these are the max settings possible, but you can only transmit 1024 channels when in 24-bit mode @44.1kHz on a 1Gbit connection.


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## Ben (Apr 21, 2021)

Jeremy Spencer said:


> I asked VSL about this when I ordered my new Mac, they said there would be zero benefit.


It depends on the channel count, sample rate and bit-depth. But yes, most (almost all) users will not come close to saturate a 1Gbit connection (especially since VEP only transmits data of channels that have data).


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 21, 2021)

Thanks everyone.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 21, 2021)

What is the arithmetic for figuring out audio streams and bandwidth?

I want to write this up on Synth and Software and be able to pretend I know what I'm talking about.


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## Jeremy Spencer (Apr 21, 2021)

Ben said:


> It depends on the channel count, sample rate and bit-depth. But yes, most (almost all) users will not come close to saturate a 1Gbit connection (especially since VEP only transmits data of channels that have data).


Good to know!


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## Ben (Apr 21, 2021)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> What is the arithmetic for figuring out audio streams and bandwidth?
> 
> I want to write this up on Synth and Software and be able to pretend I know what I'm talking about.


max. (simultan) output count = bandwith / (sample-rate * bit depth * channels per output)
For example: stereo, 44.1kHz, 32-bit, 1Gbit

n = 1.000.000.000 / (44100 * 32 * 2)
n = 354 outputs (stereo)


Disclaimer: There is an overhead during transport. I don't know how big it is, so it might further reduce the max output count a bit.
Also I'm currently not sure what bit-depth VEP uses. Might be the same as your DAW is working with (in most cases 32 or 64 bit), maybe it is fixed to 32 or 64 bit - I would have to ask one of our devs about this.


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## soothingpanic (Apr 21, 2021)

I also heard 10GB also has about 1/10th the latency of 1GB.


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## twincities (Apr 21, 2021)

Ben said:


> I'm think these are the max settings possible, but you can only transmit 1024 channels when in 24-bit mode @44.1kHz on a 1Gbit connection.


d'oh, i'm bad at reading specs apparently! (and have never personally gone past 128 channels in dante)


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 21, 2021)

Thanks very much, Ben.


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## strojo (Apr 22, 2021)

If you're transferring large amounts of data (say between your PC and a NAS), 10gbe is the way to go. Prices have come down enough to where it's a serious contender for anyone looking to update their network.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 28, 2021)

Okay, thanks for the help everyone. Here's the result:









Is 10 Gigabit Ethernet Worth It for Music Applications?


For $100 you can configure current Macs with faster networking, and PC cards now cost about the same. Should you? It looks like a no-brainer: “only” $100 more, better just add 10Gb Ethernet to the cost of the new computer and be future-proof. Well, maybe. There are benefits to the increased...




synthandsoftware.com


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## colony nofi (Apr 28, 2021)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Okay, thanks for the help everyone. Here's the result:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Nice article. More of this stuff needs to be made clear. *SO* much misinformation around.

Regardingnetworking latency mentioned earlier - its a real thing. But this is orders of magnitude different to the types of latency we talk about with audio. 

We are talking nano seconds and micro-seconds here, not milliseconds. 









Let's Take a Bit of Time to Talk about Low Latency







www.blog.adva.com





There is one very valid use case where 10GbE has proved to be a game changer for small studio businesses.

It allows almost anyone to run sessions off of shared network storage without having to drop $15k+ on specialised storage. Tiny computer + fast drive + ZFS + 10GbE = happy days for DAW use. Compare that to 1GbE - where it *is* possible, but can be painful - especially when doing constant backups of large session files.


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## wst3 (Apr 29, 2021)

the rule of thumb, which is quite often close enough, is that a stereo, CD quality signal requires about 10 MByte to store one minute of stereo CD quality audio. From there you can figure out the rest, or if you really want to do the math:

2 (channels) x 16 (bits) x 44,100 (samples per second) = 1,411,200 bits per second. Divide by 8 to find bytes per second = 176,400, divide by 1024 to find kilobytes per second = 172.7, divide again to get 0.17 megabytes per second, multiply by 60 and you get 10.09 megabytes per minute. I hope I did that clearly enough.

One more example - 1 channel, 24 bit word length, 96 kHz sample rate

24*96000 = 2,304,000 bits/second
2,304,000/8 = 288,000 bytes/second
288,000/1024 = 281.25 kbytes per second
281.25/1024 = 0.27 mBytes per second
0.27 * 60 = 16.48 mBytes/minute
16.48 *2 = 32.96 mBytes/stereo minute.

Which is a little over three times the traffic and/or storage space. And still a very small number with respect to modern networks and disc drives.

Feel free to check my math - I should probably do so too.


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## iMovieShout (Apr 29, 2021)

We've 12 Dell servers connected by 10Gb/sec and 1GB/sec as a backup network. When first setting up the rig, we tested 10GB/sec and 1Gb/sec to my DAW PC, and ran 200 instruments from 10 VEP6 servers on the Dell servers(2 years ago now), and found that we got the same utilisation on both connections, of 30Mb/sec average. So I've stuck to using 1GB/sec from the rack to my PC since then, and its worked fine. 
We also found that the 10Gb/sec network has very little latency for transferring large volumes of data between servers.

For our studio, the main benefit of using 10Gb/sec is to increase loading times of the VSL instruments and sample libraries in to the 12 VEP7 servers (about 40% faster than 1Gb/sec). Also for faster backup times of data as we also use 2 of the high-end servers for rendering video edits etc.


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## Ben (Apr 29, 2021)

Ben said:


> Also I'm currently not sure what bit-depth VEP uses.


Btw, VEP7 audio over ethernet always uses 32-bit float (I asked one of our developers).


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 29, 2021)

colony nofi said:


> We are talking nano seconds and micro-seconds here, not milliseconds


 That's a good article. Thanks.

But I don't know if I could stand to play a sample library with this kind of latency:

"The speed at which those bits travel over a fiber link is still subject to the maximum speed of light in a fiber, which is approximately 200,000 km/s"

  

(There are a few bees in my bonnet - okay, an entire swarm - but one of them is when people's first question about an audio interface is what its latency is. Sound, who cares.)


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## chrisr (Apr 29, 2021)

colony nofi said:


> Tiny computer + fast drive + ZFS + 10GbE = happy days for DAW use.


This caused me to google "ZFS", which I'd never heard of before. Interesting stuff - thanks for mentioning!


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## rdd27 (Apr 29, 2021)

@Ben I understand that 1gb is more than enough and I do this myself. However, I've always wondered about the following and would love to hear your thoughts (or your developer's).

Is there's any sense in using a 10gb connection on your DAW if it is connected to multiple VEPro PCs (which may each have a 1gb connection)?

In a small office, I know a 10gb (or above) "uplink" is often used when connecting multiple machines to data server so that none of the connecting machines bottleneck. Is there any merit to using the same argument here for VEPro? ie, if you max out 1gb one of your VEPro machines, then it doesn't bottleneck one of the others. (example diagram attached)


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## Ben (Apr 29, 2021)

rdd27 said:


> @Ben I'm understand that 1gb is more than enough. However, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts (or your developer's) on whether there's any sense in using a 10gb connection on your DAW if it is connected to multiple VEPro PCs.
> 
> In a small office, I know a 10gb (or above) "uplink" is often used when connecting multiple machines to data server so that none of the connecting machines bottleneck. Is there any merit to using the same argument here for VEPro? ie, if you max out 1gb one of your VEPro machines, then it doesn't bottleneck one of the others. (example diagram attached)


Yes, this might make sense, depending on the total output channel count.
If you fear to come close to the limits of 1Gbit networking, I would suggest to evaluate if 2.5Gbit will be enough.
In case there are any issues with this setup, test if each system works fine if directly connected to the DAW machine. Some routers (especially the cheap consumer ones) are not good at handling this kind of multi-connection.


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## Rob Elliott (Apr 29, 2021)

Thanks for posting this question Nick. I see the 'no benefit' for VEPRO (7). BUT (big butt coming at ya)....I have three slave pc's (only VEPRO on those slaves) and when ever I set my RME card to anything 1024 or above on my my main DAW (Cubase 11) on my main machine my slaves often 'stutter' and have dropouts. Same project - lower to 512 and it goes away.

Obviously the only reason I ask is when mixing and I need 1024 for ASIO and CPU headroom.

Ben - do you have a solution? Thanks in advance.


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## Ben (Apr 29, 2021)

Rob Elliott said:


> Thanks for posting this question Nick. I see the 'no benefit' for VEPRO (7). BUT (big butt coming at ya)....I have three slave pc's (only VEPRO on those slaves) and when ever I set my RME card to anything 1024 or above on my my main DAW (Cubase 11) on my main machine my slaves often 'stutter' and have dropouts. Same project - lower to 512 and it goes away.
> 
> Obviously the only reason I ask is when mixing and I need 1024 for ASIO and CPU headroom.
> 
> Ben - do you have a solution? Thanks in advance.


I remember there was a technical reason for this behavior, I have discussed it a year ago with one of our devs. But I don't remember what causes this...


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## Rob Elliott (Apr 29, 2021)

Ben said:


> I remember there was a technical reason for this behavior, I have discussed it a year ago with one of our devs. But I don't remember what causes this...


Ok - if you find it please let me know - super frustrating - usually entailing TONS of freezing parts. Tought on a 10-15 minute suite.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 29, 2021)

Ben said:


> Yes, this might make sense, depending on the total output channel count.
> If you fear to come close to the limits of 1Gbit networking, I would suggest to evaluate if 2.5Gbit will be enough.
> In case there are any issues with this setup, test if each system works fine if directly connected to the DAW machine. Some routers (especially the cheap consumer ones) are not good at handling this kind of multi-connection.


With Macs, 10Gb Ethernet is a $100 option.

2.5Gb cards on Newegg (a big online retailer in the US) are about the same price as 10Gb, so it does't really matter.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Apr 29, 2021)

But that raises another question: don't both ends have to be 10Gb, not just the port on the receiving computer?


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## Ben (Apr 29, 2021)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> With Macs, 10Gb Ethernet is a $100 option.
> 
> 2.5Gb cards on Newegg (a big online retailer in the US) are about the same price as 10Gb, so it does't really matter.


Here in Europe 2.5Gbit cards are way cheaper, and especially 10Gbit routers / switches are really expensive.



Nick Batzdorf said:


> But that raises another question: don't both ends have to be 10Gb, not just the port on the receiving computer?


Not if you have setup like in the drawing and a 10Gbit router / switch between DAW computer and VEP machines (and don't plan to go above the output limit for each VEP machine).


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## colony nofi (Apr 29, 2021)

Ben said:


> Here in Europe 2.5Gbit cards are way cheaper, and especially 10Gbit routers / switches are really expensive.
> 
> 
> Not if you have setup like in the drawing and a 10Gbit router / switch between DAW computer and VEP machines (and don't plan to go above the output limit for each VEP machine).


Simple 10Gbit routers are coming down in price quickly. Companies like Mellanox have really opened up 10GbE infrastructure for SME and home users! Even in europe 

And just to clarify further on ben's questions about both ends needing 10GbE...

You need you Workstation to have a 10GbE interface, and one port on your switch to be 10GbE which it is connected to (which is a version of your "both ends" thoughts @Nick).
The slaves can each have 1GbE interfaces, and connect to 1GbE ports on the switch. Many many switches contain different interfaces for different ports, and chances are you'll be able to find something in the not too expensive range that does what is needed. 

(I'm even just looking now at one that is mostly 1GbE ports and a SFP+ port (which supports 10GbE interconnects) - so in that case you'd just install a SFP+ port in the workstation.


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## Rob Elliott (Apr 30, 2021)

Ben said:


> I remember there was a technical reason for this behavior, I have discussed it a year ago with one of our devs. But I don't remember what causes this...


Any more information on this Ben. Problem is happening today. :(


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