Mixers/Consoles Presonus AVB Stagebox for simple Qlab i/o

Ard

Member
As a freelance designer for "straight-plays". I often don't need a mixer, but always need simple i/o on the deck, booth, and the ability to send signal from a "tech table"

The AVB MOTU's will be my eventual purchase. But I'm also eyeballing these Presonus NSB 8.8's, which are about half the cost of a MOTU stagebox, plus an AVB daisy-chain, so I don't have to buy a avb switch right away.

Can these be used like following:

NSB 8.8 (Deck) -> Ethernet -> NSB 8.8 (Booth) -> Ethernet -> Qlab/Macbook.

The MOTU stageboxes are advertised to be useable as interface, and I'm not sure these are. Anyone have experience with these in the field? Or should I save my cash for a MOTU?
 
I am 95% certain that the Presonus will not do what you it to. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have preamp control without a Presonus console in the system and wouldn't have the ability to stream directly from your laptop.

Whereas MOTU has developed custom drivers to interface their devices to newer generation Macs over AVB, that is very specific to MOTU. Doesn't work for non-MOTU devices, and to my knowledge, there are only a couple of other AVB virtual soundcard type drivers that are quite expensive and require a specific network interface chipset in order to work. You cannot universally stream from a laptop into an AVB system like you can with Dante.

In your position, I would probably put my money in Dante-capable interfaces. You don't need super specialty switches and, unless AVB has a foothold in your region, you'e more likely to encounter Dante-compatible stage boxes and consoles than AVB. You can also leverage Dante Virtual Soundcard to multitrack from your Macbook into your system. This driver costs only $30 and doesn't require special chipsets.

The MILAN partnership is building on AVB in an interesting way but in general Dante has much more market penetration in the live sound business. If integrating with consoles or other equipment isn't a priority, the MOTU should be fine for you what you want to do. If you ever want to expand outside of that that ecosystem and may want to drive directly into a console, you probably want Dante instead.
 
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