Magewell ProConvert Audio DX First Look

greetings today I'd like to take a quick first look at the magewell proon convert audio DX this is a device that converts between a number of different audio formats including Dante balanced and unbalanced analog audio ndi SRT rtmp Etc it's kind of a jack of all trade Swiss army knife it was announced what a year-ish ago I think it's been shipping now for somewhere in the six to eight months and haven't really seen much on it on YouTube other than like the trade show hey here's our new product type things so I figured be useful to sort of go over it more in depth in case people are interested in it like I was I will just make a comment real quick don't worry about my neck I had surgery recently to remove a bad disc surgery went well but it's going to take a little while for the incision to heal so I figured we'll do a quick unboxing see what you get and then we'll hook it up to the computer and see how it's configured and we can also do a few different uh latency tests and can also see how it compares to one of the other Swiss Army knives of Dante the Nitric na2 IOD Pro which sadly this has been discontinued this doesn't do all of the formats like the Mage does but it is still a very use useful box on stage so let's get into the box here we have the box it is pretty nondescript other than having a label saying it's the audio DX I suspect they use these boxes for basically all their products there's no cellophane or anything on it and it's just a flip open and cardboard box and so let's see what all we have in here so first off we have a pair of cables these are the balanced to xlrs that uses a tip ring ring ring sleeve connector sometimes called a pentacon at least in the headphone world and so you've got stereo pair in stereo pair out and these will connect to the Box because it doesn't have it's too small to have the xlrs on it directly we get a manual or at least a quick start guide we get a little bracket for side mounting we get a USB a to usbb cable it is nice that they used usbb it's a much more secure connection especially when you're dealing with a device like this we get a power brick and power brick unfortunately I kind of wish and it's also got adapters to various countries the power brick is going to be probably e-w for most people because you're going to power this either via power over Ethernet or you're going to power it uh via USB connected to your computer you have a little sticker this is the default IP address for the device when you are connecting to it over USB and then we have this padded case with the device itself and so here's the device so unbalanced In-N-Out this is just your standard 3.5 mm in andout it's a little status LED there here are those tip ring ring ring sleeve connectors for these XLR adapters here is screw uh one qu 20 so mounting on this side we have a little rotary switch which from the manual there isn't doesn't seem to do much other than it changes a board ID that is available I think that's maybe more for automation where your API scripts can query which device they're talking to by ID and then on the last side we've got the usbb port for connecting to the computer or you could also power it direct from the brick if you're just if you don't need the uh computer and then here we have ethernet with Poe capability so that's what's in the box and so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to get this hooked up to ethernet and we can start configuring it I am going to get these other cables out of the bags or the other pieces out of the bags so again you can use this as a standoff we now have moved the thread mounting position to the bottom of the device so it can sit flat if you and then we'll get these cables out so these appear to be I don't know maybe about six inches in length it's interesting that one of them has or I guess they both do it's so if you want to sort of keep them closer together you can slide that up or pull it back depending on whatever your particular desires are all right so let's get this hooked up to the computer and start fiddling with it okay so I have the USB cable connected to my IM iMac Pro it is not a very long cable maybe 3 feet or or so plug this in and blue light comes on showing it's coming up and so if we go here to 168 6.1 it has connected default login is admin admin and I am not going to change that right now by default we see sort of the overall status of the device it has presented itself as a USB composite device to the computer so you have USB network interface which is how we're able to get to this config page p and then the other thing it has done if we open audio mini setup is it is showing up as a USB audio class device and so we will do some tests with that additionally if I plug in these cables yeah we can see that now the balanced in andout have lit up so it doesn't actually care whether there's actually a signal device connected or not it's just is there a cable plugged in and it thinks that it's connected or not in and then the other thing I will do here is plug in the ethernet so that we can see it in Dante and so now we can see that it popped up with an IP address on my Dante Network and over here we can see Pro convert audio DX it has eight in and out and then also eight here we go to device info one of the things I'm curious about so this device is one of the first devices I'm aware of and that I own for that matter which is using Dante's embedded arm implementation so this is not based [Music] on Ultimo Broadway um Etc chips from audinate instead it is using their embedded arm implementation and so we can see that here if we go to latency sorry device fig so latency unfortunately because of it's in this embedded thing you don't get really fast Dante latency options it have defaulted to four and it looks like the lowest you can do is two yes uh PCM options sampling rate it can do 48k or 96 Network config um looks like they don't allow you to change any of this so you have to use DHCP or link local auto negotiate addresses there is no option to specify an IP manually so status transmit receive so if we connect this well we'll give that a moment so it's a little unfortunate that 2 milliseconds is the lowest latency that one can configure if you look up here I run most of my stuff at 500 milliseconds or microseconds rather some of the stuff that's in my wireless rack I run at 250 and then you know default stuff is one millisecond except for now we've got a 2 millisecond showing up here so in the config global settings the sample rate comes from Dante Mike bias is is it going to supply bias power for mic so if you were using you know a 3.5 mimet video s shotgun type mic or whatever it could power that UAC channels is how many CH audio channels does it present to the computer you can set two or four defaults to four MMP is auto which you probably want test pattern is is you can have it send sine wve input sensitivity so you can choose what kind of device you're using is it professional is it un you know is it consumer or is it pro audio levels for both input and output Dante so you can see the stats on uh the clock and whatnot and not a whole lot more on here stream so here you can add your transmit and receive streams so for example ndi SRT either caller or listener and rtsp and so like with ndi you can Define what the name of it is it's full ndi or NX uh reference level the transport modes so even rudp so it's doing nd5 Discovery server Etc um does not appear to have a back I guess we'll just have to do that for SRT you got all the parameters you would expect for SRT you can choose what kind of bit rate you want for it Etc you can also select encryption and give it the passphrase system device this is what it'll show up as time zone we will I am in US Central so here apply guess you have to reboot it it's sort of annoying just to change the time zone all right admin [Music] admin and the time don't um so because hopefully that doesn't have to and now you can see that it updated Network so maybe here yeah so here so they don't let you set the IP through Dante controller like you normally would but you can at least set a static through their own menu cloud magewell has their Cloud so you can remotely configure these things through that firmware now I believe there is an update because there have been several updates Pro convert open since the device was released there have been several updates already so so double check and update and we will see how long this takes and ready for it to reboot reboot all right so we're back it has not yet shown back up in Dante controller so we have some new options now that we've updated the firmwares we can see this Auto reboot section is new the API token section is new it has remembered our ntp settings in time zone Network this is showing up so why is it not showing up in Dante controller what about in dis discover it is not showing up in operation failed trying to click on the Dante tab now let's do a full power cycle and now it's showing back up again so if you do a firmware update it's probably a good idea to make sure you do a full reboot and not just a full power cycle and not just a reboot so the next thing and probably one of the more most interesting parts of this device is the Matrix where you can route basically anything to anything and so here I guess it'll be interesting to see we so in terms of you know so you could do unbalanced in to unbalanced out or balance USB Dante Etc right so by default nothing is mapped and what I thought we would do is the other thing too is the latency reset to 4 milliseconds if we say yes what happens you can't even do a remote reboot through Dante controller which is kind of interesting again that's got to be a function of this Dante embedded platform and that version has updated now with the uh change to it and actually now we have the a67 config Network config still can't change it from within Dante controller also flow information so we get total of four Flows In and Out so you could do one for each Channel it I was hoping maybe it would do a little more flows but it's better than a Ultimo based device but obviously not the same thing as a as as the more advanced Dante chips [Music] devices you can't even send it in an identified device you can still [Music] create a multicast flow on it anyway what I wanted to do was some latency testing on this device so I have RTL utility here and default audio on this Mac is Caster app this is a software mixer device and if we say measure we can see that Caster is pretty slow right 2,663 samples and that's at 512 samples if we try to do 16 sample rate it fails 32 it fails 64 still failed 96 and 96 is the lowest sample rate that successfully works with this software-based mixer so now the next thing we can try is we can select the pro convert and you can see that it has identified itself as front left front right center and low frequency event effect and if we say measure right now I expect it to fail because we haven't mapped any anything if we come over here and we say map left to left and then measure that still didn't work so what if we try 12 128 nope 160 nope 192 nope nope are we maybe just to make sure that it's not actually using one of these other channels still what if we go all the way up to 512 no so mapping USB is a trying to Loop it back on itself does not seem to be working that's not what I was expecting so what if we say we're going to Output to balanced from the left and then for USB audio we will also input from the left and then so we want the one that says that says channel two so this one here is channel one and then over here channel one so now we are looping through and what happens if we say measure that's a different error and if we look there's actually a little level [Music] meters and so on the balanced ends it sees a little bit of signal on the [Music] USB ends it doesn't but if we say measure we see the USB left Spike up we see the balance left Spike up but RTL lab utility doesn't like it and what if for kicks we try really quick so similar thing and we can see the level meters Spike up and come back down so not really sure what's going on there what if we again try instead of so this is another thing you can also do is you can actually have it mix the inputs going to an output which is kind of nice it's basic mix and also we got level meters here if we say measure we can see that Spike up but it does not like the signal so if we turn this off we say USB left measure cannot detect the signal and that should just be looping and if we look we can see we've got the meter Spike up on the left and we see the meter Spike up on the the out to the USB audio as well so not sure why that's not working if we change this to our digiface Dante and I will do outputs five so right now this will fail because it's not set up but if we open our total mix and turn on Loop back and then hit measure we can see that even with a 16 sample buffer size that this worked and it if I drag this up here when we say measure we can see that Spike real quick in total mix if I turn loop back off and also go up go to the routing page and this is yac and yac and we map five to five and then we say measure we can see we get 102 and and so only a few more samples for it to loop back through did Dante instead of just looping back in the digiface Dante itself and so the next thing let's try doing is we will say that the Mac will pull from channel one and over here we will have channel one pull from five and so we should expect this to not work right now because we haven't set up any of the Dante in The Matrix yet but if we say test we can see the spike on channel one and it's interesting that it thinks it wanted to send the channel or showing output over here as well when we haven't actually mapped it so if we come here and we say channel one to Channel One and say measure could not be detected what if we 256 measure so that worked and what is the lowest we can go what if we say 128 that worked 64 samples that worked 32 so 32 samples is too fast but at 64 samples we can Loop it Dante through the Mage well and our total delay there is 1,072 samples so the next thing let's try is we will [Music] send Dante out the balanced and then we will send the balanced back to Dante and see what happens and that worked so we know we can Loop through the balanced output which was not working when we were doing it with the USB connection and how much difference is that in latency so we went from 10 72 to 1140 and about half a millisec extra latency so the digital to audio digital to analog analog to digital conversion was fairly quick now for comparison sake so what I'm going to first do is I'm going to unmap the Pro convert and then what I'm going to do is disconnect the ethernet and I'm going to hook up a noit trick and [Music] and that flashing green is kind of annoying isn't it on the Nitric there's nothing for us to configure on the nitri itself what I'm going to do first is connect on the second port and what this means is we're doing AES digital between the out and the in and so here is that n2d Pro so we will have its output go to come from five on the [Music] computer and then five on the [Music] computer there and so now if we do measure we get 308 and also if we look at the no trick so status you can see it's based on the Broadway chipset device config it's set to half a millisecond we can see latency is coming in good and if we look here so looping through this with AES is a third the latency is of looping through the Mage well and if we do it instead on the analog side so I've connected to Port one that makes it run in analog mode and we say test analog was actually even faster than AES by a few samples right so 296 versus 308 and if we go back so the Mage well here's our channel [Music] one and channel one plug Dante back [Music] in so we will five from one then down here one from five measure and and we got a much different result 881 and it remembered the two milliseconds setting we had a few let's clear that just to measure measure so we're getting some consistent times here but they're still not the times that we had before and the latency is definitely a bit over the all over the place if we change this to say four yes which is what the default is measure we're getting again some variability and I should say I've done a bunch of RTL tests with like the Nitric and whatnot and they are consistent they don't vary so the software implementation of Dante in arm on the Mage well definitely seems to have some arities to it then let's see can we go back and try this again measure didn't like it 128 didn't like it let's double check what our matrixes so it should not actually work because we don't actually have it patched measure couldn't detect it and again 512 couldn't detect it so it does not really like going looping on the USB turn that off we will send left balance out and we can turn them well actually so if we do this um because we need this and so now we get this return level difference thing what if we take the signal back on Dante that works however huge latency and it is pretty consistently huge latency but what we're doing here is we are sending from the USB left out to the balanced left and the Bal bed left we're sending to both Dante and USB see if we turn that off does that change the latency at all no it does not all right so I think that's probably good for now so that was a quick first look at the magewell pro convert audio DX a little conversion box to go in and out from various audio formats what have we learned the latency is not spectacular so if you need this for some kind of live sound thing might not be the best choice you'd be better off with say the nitri however if you are doing it what this thing is kind of really meant for in to say taking in a Dante feed or an analog feed and sending it SRT to a remote production facility or maybe an OB truck or whatever where latency is not your concern probably works just fine we also learned that you cannot use it as a audio loop back device over USB but it does work work looping back via Dante so if you have any other questions please let me know in the comments down below and I will try to get back to you as soon as I can thanks cheers

Channel: Christopher Wichura

Views: 287

Keywords:

Id: c9HTed8Y7a4

Length: 42min 32sec (2552 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024