Network
Bandwidth and speed
When it comes to bandwidth requirements for high-quality audio, there are a number of
factors that can affect the input and output of the audio. The network speed
required for especially audio transmission via Dante® should be as high as possible
to ensure a smooth listening experience. As a rule, the minimum bandwidth for
transmitting and receiving audio at the Spectera Base Station is approximately the
following:
The majority of audio used in professional settings is PCM
(uncompressed), sampled at 48 kHz and a bit depth (word length) of 24 bits.
Dante® audio is unicast by default but can be set to use multicast for cases of
one-to-many distribution.
- Dante® packages audio into flows to save on network overhead.
- Unicast Audio flows contain up to 4 channels. The samples-per-channel can vary between 4 and 64, depending on the latency setting of the device. Bandwidth usage is about 6 Mbps per typical unicast audio flow.
- Bandwidth for multicast flows is dependent on the number of audio channels used. Bandwidth is about 1.5 Mbps per channel.
Internet access
For both components Spectera Base Station and Sennheiser LinkDesk we recommend to provide permanent Internet access. Please refer to chapter “4. Ports, protocols and services” to get more details about used Internet services.
At least for the initial product activation of the Spectera Base Station and for
the use of the optional Sennheiser Account Login in Sennheiser LinkDesk it is
mandatory to have a direct Internet access and DNS support.
At the moment it is not possible to manually configure any network proxy and DNS
server at Spectera Base Station. Please make sure to provide direct Internet access
e.g. via white-listing the device and any used port, protocol and domain and using
DHCP to provide DNS server settings.
Cabeling
As long as a good Internet speed is guaranteed, the network cable used determines the actual transmission speed of data sent and received in the network.
To ensure a reliable transmission speed of audio and control data with the Spectera
Base Station, please use an RJ45 network cable with the CAT5e S/FTP standard or
higher