LAN Center First Look & Tour

[James]

Linus gives a tour of how the future site of the Badminton Center will be able to transform into a space for LTT Whale LANs. Will anyone but him attend BOTH?

 

 

 

[RandomLegoBrick]

its always a good video when dan cohosts

 

also the audio in the video is legit impressive for the building they're in.

[Sandbass]

As an audio-engineer who specializes on commercial AV-Stuff, I feel the need to comment about your setup. Terribly sorry for that

 

Dante is cool, although there would've been nothing wrong with a couple of 8-channel Dante Amps and conventional passive speakers (makes swapping out the active component, the amp, a lot easier when it inevitably dies). For the court itself, if you have fixed directions (most importantly, what your front/"stage"-area would be), a couple of good beamsteering-columns can work wonders. There are some options, Pan Acoustics for example, which are rated to withstand ball impacts (I really couldn't find an English equivalent to "Ballwurfsicher" ) and sound pretty goody especially for voice (music will profit from some subwoofers, those could be mobile and set up just when needed).

This could dramatically decrease the number of speakers you would need.

 

As DSP I would've gone with something Yamaha. I don't know what exactly you were referring to when talking about the Dynacords echo cancellation, but if it's AEC it won't help you with feedback all that much. That's more something for video conferencing.

What you're looking for is feedback suppression, and that is a discipline where Yamaha, in my experience at least, really beats the competition by a mile. While most DSPs will use notch filtering to fight against feedback, Yamaha has the option of using pitch shift feedback suppression. Despite this being a very old school approach, it works really well, fast and doesn't destroy the frequency response of your mic like notch filtering does.

Yamaha shortly released the DME-7 which could be just the right product for your needs.

 

All that combined with a nice control-system (I'd prefer Extron in that case) and some high quality Mics (Shure ULX-D or Sennheiser ew-DX should do) and you'd be good to go.

 

Sidenote: the company I work for has developed a laser-guided camera tracking system that's meant to work with PTZ cameras. If that would be something interesting to you, slide into my DMs

 

Viele Grüße aus Deutschland!

 

[Brinstead]

Two thoughts:

 

1) gender neutral / nonbinary changing & locker area?

2) Any idea what it would cost to rent the space out?  What you're building would be perfect for a combat robotics venue, and there's a decently large group of builders in the PNW!

 

[9volt_battery]

I kinda want to see a Cisco cat 9400 or some equivalent from another brand rather than a shit ton of Ubiquiti switches like we have been seeing lately. Probably gonna come down to sponsors tho

[Needfuldoer]

Dante is a really slick ecosystem, especially when you start integrating multiple announcers and music sources.

 

For the PA system part, I'd recommend looking into an RTS ODIN with a few keypanels and belt packs. It's not cheap by any means, and the configuration software looks like it's straight out of 1994, but it's the most dead-nuts reliable intercom I've used in my going on 15 years in TV. It integrates well with Dante, and there are a ton of ways you can abuse creatively apply its features. (For example I'd build the overhead speakers as IFBs, so that talking to them will dim any music that's playing without cutting it off harshly.) Is it absolutely the best solution for you? Maybe not, but it's the one I'm most familiar with.

[Somtaw]

I've been looking forward to seeing some progress on this, it's definitely going to become a necessary stop whenever I find myself on the mainland. 

[KingOlim]

3 hours ago, Brinstead said:

Two thoughts:

 

1) gender neutral / nonbinary changing & locker area?

2) Any idea what it would cost to rent the space out?  What you're building would be perfect for a combat robotics venue, and there's a decently large group of builders in the PNW!

 

I'd love to see them add a gender neutral changing / locker area for inclusiveness!

[MattyTech]

Do you guys have a writeup on lancache? or some links to info/documentation? (hopefully not 'monolithic' as I run into too many issues with that version)

[MarkPol88]

6 hours ago, smthclever said:

Do you really need multiple 4090s to power a camera-based automatic badminton scoreboard? I want to say this can be done on a Raspberry Pi.

They are thinking about machine learning algorithm hooked up to vision system - something like "Eagle-eye" on tennis courts, with automatic scoring, quick reviews and more. I do not think that Raspberry would be best, especially with many simultaneous matches.

[tkitch]

6 hours ago, smthclever said:

Do you really need multiple 4090s to power a camera-based automatic badminton scoreboard? I want to say this can be done on a Raspberry Pi.

The GPUs are to power the AI that tracks the shuttle shuttlecock to score automatically. 

 

It's not to display a few numbers 

[sub68]

So the meme idea from lan show is actually going to happen.

7 hours ago, Sandbass said:

Dante is cool, although there would've been nothing wrong with a couple of 8-channel Dante Amps and conventional passive speakers (makes swapping out the active component, the amp, a lot easier when it inevitably dies).

As a sound engineer yes, its not meant to be a installed system. (Havent used dante but used berhinger systems but know enough)

7 hours ago, Sandbass said:

All that combined with a nice control-system (I'd prefer Extron in that case) and some high quality Mics (Shure ULX-D or Sennheiser ew-DX should do) and you'd be good to go.

I have 2 extron A/V switches (cheap surplus) honestly simple is better and works so much better in installed sytems.

[soccermomisqueen]

Because Dan asked for it, here is the link to the reverb clap

https://youtu.be/DoQT5i9Iz84?t=848

 

[GameSofter]

Gonna step into the waters here too and I really hope it comes across that I want to help and educate as much as possible here, seeing a lot of misguided comments on youtube.

Dante is not "meant" for any specific use case. Install, rental, corporate, tour, they all use it, it's just audio over IP. The biggest tours in the world use it for some aspect of their production and you've definitely been to a concert where you heard audio because of Dante. And until AVB Milan is more widely adopted, Dante is what you'll see in a lot of installed applications for professional live sound in most venues.

I read some misguided comments on the video saying 40 speakers will cause issues because of the multicast traffic. Proper multicast flows with IGMP snooping running on the same stack of switches (Brand, model, properly configured) will handle a single to many source just fine. My gig at the moment runs with a bunch of CL/QL mixing desks, rio's, AVIOs for drop down boxes, Virtual Soundcard instances, many Axient digital and ULX-D racks, and a bunch of other stuff that all adds up to channel counts in the thousands with no dropouts.

Please don't try to integrate your public (physically accessible to everyone, and very, very busy) network with the Dante audio net. Dedicated, physical switches for Dante is the best and reliable way (Netgear AV line or Cisco 350, used both, both are rock solid. Yamaha and Luminex are also good but they're quite old now). Putting other traffic on that net quickly leads to audio dropouts, subscription issues, PTP errors, devices disappearing, unscrupulous LAN goers putting their own audio on any device on the network if a vlan is left accessible...

Redundancy is your friend in the world of network audio. If you can run two cables (It's a new build, you totally can), run two cables.

And I can't speak to Dynacord, quick google leads me to believe it's a *fine* matrix mixer and audio processor. But for the sake of all the flexibility, reliability and power you should at least look into QSYS for your audio and A/V control system, I think you'd be much happier with that in the long run. Audio, lighting, and video control systems all in one very capable box with so many logic systems you can program and fantastic support.

I LOVE the flexibility that individual PoE pendants and ceiling speakers get you. Every speaker is an endpoint and it's how I'd want to build it! But it's always a good exercise to plan a distributed 70v system with plenty of zones to see if you can get the same or better coverage for less $ and complication.

[Block0]

8 hours ago, 9volt_battery said:

I kinda want to see a Cisco cat 9400 or some equivalent from another brand rather than a shit ton of Ubiquiti switches like we have been seeing lately. Probably gonna come down to sponsors tho

if i see another wall of ubiquiti im gonna loose my shit

[Manmeyco]

I feel like I missed something, when did Linus first drop that he bought this place?

[Polderviking]

13 hours ago, 9volt_battery said:

I kinda want to see a Cisco cat 9400 or some equivalent from another brand rather than a shit ton of Ubiquiti switches like we have been seeing lately. Probably gonna come down to sponsors tho

Or just not wanting to deal with too many different vendors at the same time.

[tkitch]

7 minutes ago, smthclever said:

What does the AI do exactly in tracking the shuttlecock, and how would a huge database of past games help an AI engine predict/accelerate/improve scoring future games? There doesn't seem to be much correlation there to me, but I don't watch sportsball so I'm not aware of current industry standards. Even if AI is needed, and I'm skeptical, do you really need the computing power of 6x 4090s? There are also AI SBCs like the Jetson Nano and even AI addons for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. To me this seems more a problem of integrating cameras/lasers with software and working to reduce errors over time, and I'm skeptical that such massive power is needed for this task.

it's not tracking one game.

 

And the fact you're dismissively calling it "sportsball" means you don't actually care, you just want to shit on it.  So I'm done now. 

[Sandbass]

12 hours ago, GameSofter said:

And I can't speak to Dynacord, quick google leads me to believe it's a *fine* matrix mixer and audio processor. But for the sake of all the flexibility, reliability and power you should at least look into QSYS for your audio and A/V control system, I think you'd be much happier with that in the long run. Audio, lighting, and video control systems all in one very capable box with so many logic systems you can program and fantastic support.

I LOVE the flexibility that individual PoE pendants and ceiling speakers get you. Every speaker is an endpoint and it's how I'd want to build it! But it's always a good exercise to plan a distributed 70v system with plenty of zones to see if you can get the same or better coverage for less $ and complication.

I'm a bit torn when it comes to Q-Sys. Yes, it's incredibly flexible and versatile. But when it comes to reliability and processing capabilities I would prefer the Yamaha + Extron IPCP Pro solution. I have plenty experience with both, and while both ecosystems do their job, I had a lot more trouble with buggy firmwares etc. with Q-Sys. For something that "just needs to work" and doesn't profit from the reeeaaallly nice BYOD video conferencing integration, it's not my first choice. 

Again on the PoE speakers - I am absolutely for individual controls over every (or at least most) speaker(s), but I would prefer to do exactly that with passive speakers. Just because troubleshooting and setting everything up can be so much simpler if all your active components are in one rack. Also helps with centralized heat dissipation.  

 

I've set up an installation like that 2-3 years ago. Around 60-70 speakers distributed in an exhibition, driven by seven QSC CX-Q 4K8 8-channel amplifiers, creating an immersive sound environment. Processing and control is handled by redundant Q-Sys Core510i, all audio signals are played back directly within the Q-Sys system (64 channel audio player license). Would've taken me a lot longer, had those been Dante PoE speakers  

[tkitch]

38 minutes ago, smthclever said:

It means that I am not personally interested in sports--it is interesting that you took offense to that line. I am interested in the solution to this problem more generally though.

No, it's dismissive and diminutive of something other people enjoy.  

 

"Go enjoy your pokey-mans" is one way to do it to gamers, and has the same effect.  

It's hella pejorative and shits on things other people like.  It's rude as fuck, and we shouldn't do it.

IDGAF About sports, but I'ma let other people enjoy things that I don't have to. 

[Middcore]

I'm sick to death of seeing people say "sportsball," it comes off as dripping derision and unearned superiority whether people mean it that way or not and it's part of a tired "nerds vs jocks" way of looking at the world that stopped making sense decades ago to the extent it ever made sense at all.

[GodAtum]

Why is LTT going into the sports arena industry? As part of the planning license?

[tkitch]

9 hours ago, GodAtum said:

Why is LTT going into the sports arena industry? As part of the planning license?

Because linus likes badminton 

[danwat1234]

6:20 yeah, stacking servers floor to ceiling, nothing wrong with that! Or Optiplex/Prodesk SFFs anyway.

[GOTSpectrum]

On 1/31/2024 at 7:25 PM, GodAtum said:

Why is LTT going into the sports arena industry? As part of the planning license?

Well technically I believe it's not LTT or even LMG that's going into the sports arena industry, it's Linus himself