First Real-Time Multi-Channel Audio Internet Demo for the 107th Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention
Streaming real-time audio over wide-area networks has become a popular way to transmit audio content; however, network quality has tended to limit the range of formats and quality of the audio. Using advanced networks, it is possible to overcome some of these limitations, and implement
applications that involve the transmission of higher bandwidth multi-channel
audio content in real time.
The September 1999 AES demonstrations took place in a theater space
at New York University (NYU), where dancers from that university performed
to music provided remotely by a McGill jazz band playing live at
McGill University in Montreal. The music was acquired as a multi-channel
audio signal, and streamed to NYU across a high-performance network
managed by CANARIE and Internet2.
Compressed and uncompressed multi-channel audio transmission of
different sampling rates and word size were featured. The underlying software
for the demonstration was developed at McGill University by a team
involving several members of the Technical Committee on Network Audio
Systems.
