Savant Backs AVB Ecosystem for Whole-Home Networked Media

Savant joined the Avnu Alliance as a promoting member, it said Friday. The consortium of professional, automotive, consumer electronics and industrial manufacturing companies is working to ensure interoperability of devices within the Audio Video Bridging (AVB) ecosystem. “Savant was one of the first whole-home technology companies to move past the matrixed audio distribution topology into an infrastructure where audio content moves over a single Ethernet cable,” said Tim Locascio, Savant vice president-engineering. The company chose the AVB ecosystem for its reliability with audio over IP, zero-configuration and self-healing attributes, he said, noting AVB is an open IEEE 802.1 standard, “much like 802.11 networking standards,” that's “free, future-proof and innovative." Savant will participate in pre-certification working groups, facilitate technical updates and certification standards and ensure vendors’ certified products are interoperable. Greg Schlechter, Avnu Alliance president, said Savant’s choice to use AVB is a “proof point” for the standard's potential benefit to the custom install market as a foundation for networked media.