Maximizing Channel Output

When working on your system design, it may be important to maximize your audio output channels.

Every unique signal that you send to an I/O Frame uses one Network Audio Channel,

but when that signal is being shared amongst multiple amplifiers

and loudspeakers you can achieve far more physical output channels than Network Audio Channels.

The key to maximizing your channel output is to use your Network Audio Channels wisely.

If you have an I/O Frame with four Line Out cards, you could send one channel to this Frame

and then fan-out­ that one channel over all sixteen outputs in the I/O Cards.

Now you have sixteen physical outputs that are all carrying the same audio signal,

and you have only used one Network Audio Channel, which is packaged into one Network Audio Stream.

If you had sixty-four I/O Frames and each one of them only received one audio channel

(which could be sixty-four different channels, or it could all be the same channel)

then each of these I/O Frames would use one Network Audio Stream with one Network Audio Channel in it,

so on a Core 110f you will be at your maximum of 64 Network Audio streams Out.

But each one of those 64 I/O Frames can then fan-out its audio signal over its 16 Line-Outputs,

meaning that you have achieved a maximum of 1024 output channels.

And different Cores can handle different loads.

The Core 110f can handle up to 128 input channels and 128 output channels.

The Core 500i has 128 flex channels, which can be used as either inputs or outputs.

The Core1100 can handle up to 256 channels in and 256 channels out,

and the Core 3100 can handle up to 512 by 512.

The system can use up to 900 Mbps of bandwidth,

so it is very unlikely that you’ll ever see a scenario where you are running out of network bandwidth.

However, if you’re sharing this gigabit network with other devices outside the Q-SYS system,

you may want to keep bandwidth efficiency in mind when building the system. Let me show you an example.

Every Network Audio Stream to or from an I/O Frame takes up some of your bandwidth from the network.

In this example, there are sixteen input channels all going into one I/O Frame,

which are packaged into one Network Audio Stream.

This then leaves the system via another Network Audio Stream

to sixteen output channels on a different I/O Frame. This design is very efficient.

But if an I/O Frame has both inputs and outputs, it will use two Network Audio Streams.

This design here has the exact same setup as the last one, except the I/O Frames each have half the inputs

and half the outputs. You can see that this requires two Network Audio Streams in,

and two Network Audio Streams out,

which has increased the amount of bandwidth on the network that you’re using.

So if you weren’t sure before, hopefully this has clarified the different capacities of the Q-SYS Core.

With the right understanding of its abilities, you’ll be able to maximize the efficiency of your system

and make sure you customize your Core to your installation’s specific needs.

Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.