It's actually a double meaning: It's "the Intelligent Network" because all the devices (I/O boxes, consoles, and controllers) have built in intelligence and network connections that allow them to freely exchange data and control amongst them. Button panels can control mixers, consoles can control routing, Automation can control levels, Codecs can start recorders, you get the idea.  All of this intelligence is built into the hardware and doesn't require PCs to run it. And each one of our BLADES (our name for the I/O boxes) has so much built in intelligence that it can control all the audio routing and logic functions of the entire network so you're never in the situation that "the network is down" because some control unit or PC failed. Each BLADE has enough intelligence to stream all of its audio I/O, drive its front panel display and meters, perform system wide routing control, manage 64 soft and 12 hard logic ports, operate two 8x2 utility mixers and their faders, operate 8 channels of silence detection switching and alarms with full parameter control, and monitor the network for external control by someone else. All of this is happening while the built in PowerPC processor runs a web server and SNMP server for administrative control and monitoring. That's a lot of smarts compared to the simple I/O boxes you'll find on other systems.

The second meaning is because of all this capability, we think it's very "intelligent" for you to deploy the Wheatstone WNIP network.

That's a great question worth some explanation. While it's true that 1G is not needed to just stream 8 channels of stereo audio, the facts bear some examination. As noted above, our BLADEs do much more than stream 8 channels. Because of our true mono capability, utility mixers, silence detect switching channels, and so forth, each BLADE is capable of streaming as many as 64 channels of audio. There's no way that would fit in a 100Mb link. By providing this bandwidth from the start we have the capacity to do all of this and still leave room for any ideas we might get for future enhancements. In other words, the network is future proofed.

Another point that shouldn't be missed is that 1G networks run 2 1/2 times faster than 100Mb ones. That means our network has less than 1/2 the transmission latency of a 100Mb network.

Another great question. All AoIP systems have to deal with something called packet overhead. Because we are all using standard protocols, there is a whole bunch of data that must accompany each "packet" of data  to adhere to the standards. This is addressing, protocol, and timing information that all network switches depend on to route the packets to the right places. This packet overhead is actually more than 10 times more data than an audio sample. Since a standard IP packet can hold up to 1500 bytes of data, to be able to actually stream audio on the network efficiently, we all bundle or group a number of audio samples together in each packet, thus minimizing the percent of data used for the overhead. You can see that the more audio samples you can cram into each packet, the less packets you have to send and the lower the overhead becomes. In some systems, this is done because of limited bandwidth and processor resources, the result is that these streams have about 100msec of latency. Why does latency go up with these larger packets? It's simple: it takes more time to assemble these larger packets because the audio data is created at its normal sample rate. Said another way; you have to wait for all of the audio samples to get enough data to fill the packet; waiting means latency goes up.

The WNIP Intelligent Network does it differently: we have enough bandwidth with gigabit links and enough processing power that we can make every packet a smaller, low latency packet.  You're not forced to have to make a choice  nor do you need to spend the effort to specify packet depth per stream.

Actually the opposite is the case. While it is true that our system requires 1G switches (which all the new ones are anyway), the cost of switches in a Wheatstone system is less than with other systems. This is because our super intelligent BLADEs manage the multicast channels used in the network to transport audio rather than forcing all devices to be constantly streaming on every channel, even if no one needs the stream anywhere. In a non-WheatNet-IP system, the multicast channels are unmanaged and the net effect is that the system switches must be sized to the theoretical maximum or the system simply doesn't work. Doing it the way we do it increases the efficiency of the network exponentially and prevents the very real danger that adding one more box to a system could crash the whole network.

Even the largest of the Wheatstone systems built, with over (100) I/O boxes, are running successfully with inexpensive rackmount switches. This, in contrast to spending $20,000 to $40,000-plus for chassis based switches after installation which can be a huge unplanned-for expense.

It's true, our system is the easiest to set up by far. It's so easy that our sales guys always like to set a system up live in real time when they visit clients for demos. You can start with raw un-configured hardware right out of the box and have a complete system, with console, up and running and mixing audio in less than 10 minutes.

Here's what's involved: plug all of your BLADE and control surface network cables into your switch and then power everything up. Each device boots up into what we call the "Set-Up Wizard". It sits there waiting with the front panel display showing a suggested BLADE ID number. Spin the front panel knob to pick a unique number for each BLADE, and then press the knob three times to accept the ID number and associated automatically generated IP address and subnet mask. We put those pauses in there so you can choose custom addresses if you want to but its not necessary, just accept the suggested defaults.. It doesn't matter what the ID numbers are either, they just need to be unique. We generally do something that will be easy to remember, like the first one is "1" and the second one is "2" and so forth.

As soon as you press the knob the third time the BLADE automatically joins the network, creates streaming channels for each of its audio ports, and joins the multicast control channel announcing itself to the rest of the system. Bingo you're done. Plug in your audio source and route it to where you want it to go.

For our control surfaces, click on the Options tab, and select "Network Settings" from the drop-down menu. This brings up the network settings panel. There is a box where you can specify the BLADE ID of the Engine BLADE that will be associated with the surface. Enter the desired BLADE ID and click on "Automatically Configure" and bingo you're done again. The Engine BLADE automatically creates all of the mixes and processing DSP channels needs to match that control surface and creates all of the source and destination and logic channels needed to get audio to all of the faders and send it from all of the mixes with logic control. Pick a fader channel, spin the encoder to choose an audio source from the system and pot it up. You're now mixing, it was really that simple.

We suggest, when requesting live demos of any system you are interested in, that you specify that boxes are opened and the system configured in your facility for the first time as a part of the demo so that you can get a feel for initial setup as well as what that might mean to future expansion and maintenance.

Yes. WheatNet-IP can be transported over fiber-optic Ethernet links just as easily as on metal (Cat-6) gigabit Ethernet.

All that's needed at each end of the fiber link is a gigabit Ethernet switch with a SFP (Small Form-factor Pluggable) interface port. You install an SFP module for the type of fiber you will be using (single-mode or multi-mode) and the type of connectors you need.

One possible application for WheatNet-IP and fiber is a stage snake.  WheatNet-IP can be easily configured for this application. Each end of the fiber would connect to an SFP (Small Form-factor Pluggable) fiber module in a gigabit Ethernet switch at each end of the link. You would then connect WheatNet-IP BLADEs via Cat-6 to each switch. For example, two IP-88a BLADEs at the console end and three IP-88m BLADEs at the stage would give you a 24 x 24 channel bidirectional stage snake. Because the IP-88m mic BLADEs have analog outputs, these could also be used as a split in lieu of returns, or an additional IP-88a could be added for returns.

An advantage here over conventional cabling and even over some commercial fiber snakes is that you can easily route any input at one end to any output at the other. The utility mixers in the BLADEs can even be used as submixes.

You'll also have logic closures available at both ends -- need an interface for cue lights? It's in there.