• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

ENCO

B

biggladman

Inactive
Inactive User
Hey yall...

I have an Enco issue or two that I need some answers for.
My radio facility is currently running 23 Enco workstations that are linked via Ethernet to a primary and backup server. The computers have standard 10/100 Ethernet connections and are running through the appropriate switches.

The workstations are running Digigram audio cards (standard Enco gear) and are synched to our digital house system using Word Clock.

I am noticing that the system is experiencing audio lags and stuttering during playback. This will happen intermittently, however it tends to be fairly consistent (Once every two hours or so). This issue is not restricted to one machine and tends to happen across the board. As we are a major broadcast facility, this is becoming a major problem.

The other problem we are having is that cuts wont fire immediately when they are triggered. There is often a half to full second gap that occurs when the cut is fired.

We have tried virtually every solution in the book, including intensive on site sessions with Enco tech support and we cannot seem to get this problem solved. We are taking other measures however, any advice you might have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Andy G
ENCOland
 
I've done an Enco demo or two, but I'm not familiar with its architecture. Does it play audio directly from the PC's hard drive, or does it stream across the network from the server?

Do you have the Enco system on its own network segment, with its own switches? Better to segregate it from everything else in the building, so that network congestion elsewhere in the building doesn't cause trouble for Enco.

This is especially true if Enco is streaming the audio from the server, but I have seen network congestion issues affect machines even when they don't stream.
 
> Hey yall...
>
> I have an Enco issue or two that I need some answers for.
> My radio facility is currently running 23 Enco workstations
> that are linked via Ethernet to a primary and backup server.
> The computers have standard 10/100 Ethernet connections and
> are running through the appropriate switches.
>
> The workstations are running Digigram audio cards (standard
> Enco gear) and are synched to our digital house system using
> Word Clock.
>
> I am noticing that the system is experiencing audio lags and
> stuttering during playback. This will happen intermittently,
> however it tends to be fairly consistent (Once every two
> hours or so). This issue is not restricted to one machine
> and tends to happen across the board. As we are a major
> broadcast facility, this is becoming a major problem.
>
> The other problem we are having is that cuts wont fire
> immediately when they are triggered. There is often a half
> to full second gap that occurs when the cut is fired.
>
> We have tried virtually every solution in the book,
> including intensive on site sessions with Enco tech support
> and we cannot seem to get this problem solved. We are taking
> other measures however, any advice you might have would be
> greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andy G
> ENCOland

My suggestion: dump ENCO. Problem solved :)<P ID="signature">______________
"Get educated. Read stuff on the web and believe all of it."
-- Phil Hendrie
http://theradioblog.blogspot.com</P>
 
We use Prophet Nexgen, but have seen the same issues.
When was the last time the old files were cleaned out, and a full de-frag run?
Another question, are the drives near capacity? Another possibility...

good luck..

fmnostatic



> > Hey yall...
> >
> > I have an Enco issue or two that I need some answers for.
>
> > My radio facility is currently running 23 Enco
> workstations
> > that are linked via Ethernet to a primary and backup
> server.
> > The computers have standard 10/100 Ethernet connections
> and
> > are running through the appropriate switches.
> >
> > The workstations are running Digigram audio cards
> (standard
> > Enco gear) and are synched to our digital house system
> using
> > Word Clock.
> >
> > I am noticing that the system is experiencing audio lags
> and
> > stuttering during playback. This will happen
> intermittently,
> > however it tends to be fairly consistent (Once every two
> > hours or so). This issue is not restricted to one machine
> > and tends to happen across the board. As we are a major
> > broadcast facility, this is becoming a major problem.
> >
> > The other problem we are having is that cuts wont fire
> > immediately when they are triggered. There is often a half
>
> > to full second gap that occurs when the cut is fired.
> >
> > We have tried virtually every solution in the book,
> > including intensive on site sessions with Enco tech
> support
> > and we cannot seem to get this problem solved. We are
> taking
> > other measures however, any advice you might have would be
>
> > greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andy G
> > ENCOland
>
> My suggestion: dump ENCO. Problem solved :)
>
 
It sounds like you really have two different problems.

1) Studdering audio: Can it be assumed you are an all digital facility? (sounds like it bacause you use WC to lock your workstations). Are the inputs to the enco's locked to the same WC? If they are from a video source is your house 'black' and AES reference from the same source? My experience is that Enco systems and Digigram cards are sensitive to timing and reference issues when using AES inputs and outputs. Especially if the reference source (in the audio setup menu) is set to use reference from AES inputs and there is *any* interruptions or instabilities to that input the output audio will have problems.

Try running one workstation as an all analog machine for test purposes. Analog in, out, and no reference connected. Run it for a while and see if the studdering goes away. If so then you are looking at a digital audio related issue (not an enco problem per se).

2) Delay when cuts are fired: Is this when cuts are fired from the touch screen or a GPI pulse? Do you do an exclusive rebuild (it's an enco thing) once a week (icluding restarting the workstations)? Do you have logging turned off on that worstation?

Lastly, I would reccomend going to

http://email.enco.com/public/listarchive

They have a very active user community that can assist is solving problems and folks are not shy about chiming in if they have had the same problems.

Best of luck....
Joe






> Hey yall...
>
> I have an Enco issue or two that I need some answers for.
> My radio facility is currently running 23 Enco workstations
> that are linked via Ethernet to a primary and backup server.
> The computers have standard 10/100 Ethernet connections and
> are running through the appropriate switches.
>
> The workstations are running Digigram audio cards (standard
> Enco gear) and are synched to our digital house system using
> Word Clock.
>
> I am noticing that the system is experiencing audio lags and
> stuttering during playback. This will happen intermittently,
> however it tends to be fairly consistent (Once every two
> hours or so). This issue is not restricted to one machine
> and tends to happen across the board. As we are a major
> broadcast facility, this is becoming a major problem.
>
> The other problem we are having is that cuts wont fire
> immediately when they are triggered. There is often a half
> to full second gap that occurs when the cut is fired.
>
> We have tried virtually every solution in the book,
> including intensive on site sessions with Enco tech support
> and we cannot seem to get this problem solved. We are taking
> other measures however, any advice you might have would be
> greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andy G
> ENCOland
>
 
Elaborating on what awsherrill was talking about...

You really should make sure you're using a switch, dedicated to these machines, that has a backbone (internal bandwidth) of at least Gig-E throughput in full-duplex (2Mbit up+down).

At radioio we're using good ol spidf for digital audio, but our tracks are located on a SAN (storage area network). And we have dual Gig-E cards in all the machines, with 10Gbit full-duplex (20Gbit up+down) switches, and a router that can handle 40Gbit full duplex, but is upgradeable to a lot more. Oh yeah, our website's linux wall has a few of it's own 10Gbit switches which run through our router there. None of our stream servers are in the same NOC though.


At any rate, even just getting a switch with 1Gbit full-duplex backbone should help a lot.

And definately think about getting at least a RAID 5 drive array, so that (a) your solution will never go down or experience data loss and (b) you can defrag the drives without much fear of aggrivating the problem and (c) the drives are "hot-swappable" on the fly without much loss in performance even in the extreemist cases.

You might also think about getting a decent peice of hardware to run your server on that has at least dual powersupplys and dual cpus, if not dual motherboards with 4 or more total cpus.

Ideally you could get a 10Gbit backbone switch with 10/100/1000 autosense ports, and connect the server to it with dual Gig-E cards, and either split up the access to the 2 IPs or get a nice router to bridge em.

:)

hope that helps instead of confuses
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.
Back
Top Bottom