Lighting and audio network/Wi-Fi advice.

Hi, I have a question about networking in venues and what the normal solution is in this situation.

TLDR: Is there a good/standard way to keep lighting and audio networks isolated while allowing remote control/rfr/ipads etc to connect from one wifi network to both the lighting and audio consoles.

Currently we have a Cobalt20 console with a separate isolated network for art-net, and another isolated network for control. This control network has a wifi AP and is also shared with our audio consoles for ipad control. This means we need to connect two network cables to the LX console to get both artnet and rfr control. As we don’t use the rfr much this hasn’t been a big issue until now.

We will soon be getting an apex console plus laptop for nomad and would like to consolidate the lighting onto one network, as this seems to be the standard for eos networks and would mean only one network cable –  simplifying patching and making it easier to connect the nomad pc.

The problem with this is that we would then be combining artnet/sACN, net3, ipad rfr etc with the audio console, artist iPads and occasionally Shure ULXD recievers with dante all on the same network, this seems like a bad idea. To clarify, the shure receivers are connected to the control network for monitoring from the audio console, and as they share this with dante traffic on the same connection there is no way to separate at this location.

The obvious solution would be to have one network for LX and one for audio, however this would mean having to switch wireless networks on the iPad and also having a second set of wifi APs. The 2.4 and 5g band are very full in our venue so we would like to avoid adding more APs.

Is it recommended to do this with subnets and VLANS? Something like one subnet and VLAN for LX, one for sound and a router to allow only ipad/control traffic to be routed to one network with the wifi APs? I have experience configuring VLANs and routing in other organizations but I’ve only ever used flat networks for this application.

Also note, we do not have separate departments in our venue, techs work on multiple things in one day hence the need to use one ipad to control everything and minimize re-patching of data.

Any thoughts appreciated,

Tim.

Parents
  • Lots of ways to solve this. In general your lighting network and other networks should be completely isolated from eachother, especially when both audio and lighting can have latency sensativity. 

    Our genearl setup is the lighting network is its own island, with no connection to the internet. We do put a WiFi router on the lighting network, for things like iRFR, but there is no internet access itself, just access to the lighting network. I never want to have to worry if someone else is doing something that is impacting my network/performance/etc. 

    At the most basic level this can be physically isolated networks.

    In bigger setups, you might run mutliple VLAN's, which are trunked together, so you might have a 10GB fiber at front of house, and that is shared between two separate VLAN networks -- audio and lighting (and in our case also a separate video network and general production network).

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  • Lots of ways to solve this. In general your lighting network and other networks should be completely isolated from eachother, especially when both audio and lighting can have latency sensativity. 

    Our genearl setup is the lighting network is its own island, with no connection to the internet. We do put a WiFi router on the lighting network, for things like iRFR, but there is no internet access itself, just access to the lighting network. I never want to have to worry if someone else is doing something that is impacting my network/performance/etc. 

    At the most basic level this can be physically isolated networks.

    In bigger setups, you might run mutliple VLAN's, which are trunked together, so you might have a 10GB fiber at front of house, and that is shared between two separate VLAN networks -- audio and lighting (and in our case also a separate video network and general production network).

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