Open Standards/ChoirWire distributed audio mixing

ChoirWire is a scalable, fault tolerant, distributed digital sound mixer system especially for life concert purposes.

A distributed sound mixing system is able to grow together with the choir or ensemble.

Aim of the project is to define an open standard for the physical and logical data layer so that different hardware and software projects worldwide by students or professionals can be established and work together.



Fig.1: Example of Use-Case of ChoirWire standard

ChoirWire is a definition for a low cost system with good performance and the possibility of high channel count. Goal is not to define state of the art. (Distributed audio mixers which are coupled via optical high speed communication are on the market for a few mio. Dollars.)

This KISS-standard shall be suitable for a stage audio system with 2-512 input channels, two main and up to four distributed monitor outputs and one remote mixing console. Every distributed input has its own adjustable logical address (0-255) on which it is identified. It doesn’t care on which socket an input is plugged in. The amount of data shall not be too high so that standard components with low cost can be used. Nevertheless a data main stream of 2x23bit is foreseen to make high quality as well possible as single chip solutions.

Contents

 * /Main principle/
 * /Definition of the ChoirWire standard/
 * /Conformity to ChoirWire standard/
 * /Application Examples/