Cobranet - History

History

CobraNet was developed in 1996 by Boulder, Colorado-based Peak Audio. Initial demonstrations were of a 10 Mbit/s point-to-point system with limited channel capacity. The first permanent installation of CobraNet in this early form was to provide background music throughout the Animal Kingdom theme park. The first commercial use of CobraNet as an interoperable standard was during the half-time show at Super Bowl XXXI in 1997.

CobraNet was first introduced as an interoperable standard in collaboration with manufacturer QSC Audio Products. QSC was the first to license the technology from Peak Audio and marketed it under the RAVE brand. At this point CobraNet had graduated to fast Ethernet and used a unique collision avoidance technique to carry up to 64 channels per Ethernet collision domain.

CobraNet was subsequently enhanced to support and eventually require a switched Ethernet network. An SNMP agent was added for remote control and monitoring. Support for higher sample rates, increased bit resolutions and lowered latency capabilities were later introduced in an incremental and backwards-compatible manner.

In May 2001, Cirrus Logic announced that it had acquired the assets of Peak Audio. Leveraging Cirrus DSP technology, a low-cost SoC implementation of CobraNet was developed and marketed. CobraNet has been widely adopted by commercial audio equipment manufacturers and is used in many facilities.