AES Standards News Blog

The AES67 Standard for audio applications of networks - High-performance streaming audio-over-IP interoperability has become the cornerstone of IP based audio applications.   It has received wide acceptance among manufacturers and users of networked audio equipment in professional applications.

This revision contains clarifications and minor corrections and adds a Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement (PICS) as an Annex. A new sender keep-alive recommendation, has been added to clause 6.3. Minor clarifications and corrections include a specification of MTU requirements in the presence of allowed (but not recommended) additional information in the RTP header and correcting SDP examples in clause 8.5 to match an erratum issued by the IETF on RFC 7273. Also, the domainNumber range was corrected to conform to IEEE 1588-2008 requirements.

The Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement (PICS) Annex is a valuable tool to insure proper compliance of AES67 implementations.   An implementation of AES67 that is claimed to conform to the standard must complete a PICS proforma as described in Annex G:

A completed PICS proforma is the PICS for the implementation in question. The PICS is a statement of which capabilities and options of the protocol have been implemented. The PICS can be used for a variety of purposes by various parties, including the following:

a) As a checklist by the protocol implementer, to reduce the risk of failure to conform to the standard through oversight;

b) As a detailed indication of the capabilities of the implementation, stated relative to the common basis for understanding provided by the standard PICS proforma, by the supplier and acquirer, or potential acquirer, of the implementation;

c) As a basis for initially checking the possibility of interworking with another implementation by the user, or potential user, of the implementation (note that, while interworking can never be guaranteed, failure to interwork can often be predicted from incompatible PICS).