Digital Multicores
| This section contains information of unclear or questionable importance or relevance to the article's subject matter. Please help improve this article by clarifying or removing superfluous information. |
Audio systems can now use digital multicore systems where the audio signal is encoded to digital using analog-to-digital converters, the channels are bundled together to be transported on a single wire to a destination then re-converted back to analog using D-to-As. Sometimes all that is run to the mix positions is control and all audio processing occurs in the Mix Box, or Stage Box.
The main problem with digital multicores is latency, the time taken to encode into digital and then back into analog at the mixing console. Most stand alone digital consoles take their inputs in analog format and the cumulative latency is too great to go unnoticed. The second problem is cost, it is currently much more expensive to use a digital multicore for small systems. Most multicore systems use Ethernet wiring as the physical medium, but the system must be as close to synchronous as possible and cannot share the same cable as data systems due to the risk of collisions.
Read more about this topic: Audio Multicore Cable