Sound Control Protocol Digital 6000 (EM 6000 | L 6000)

SSC Developer‘s guide for Digital 6000 | 7/57
Introduction
1. Introduction
Modern professional audio devices are designed as building blocks for large, complex systems.
Whereas audio signal paths have converged to industry standards a long time ago, driven by prac-
tical necessities, and only recently challenged by new transport technologies like Ethernet, the pro-
fessional audio markets have not evolved a similar technological convergence in the area of remote,
centralised control of systems of audio equipment (the notable historical exception being MIDI, which
but has a limited scope and extensibility).
In this heterogeneous environment of diverging standards proposed by individual vendors as well
as open communities, there is no existing self-evident solution to be found for the needs raised by
designing professional Sennheiser audio equipment.
As a consequence, communication protocols implemented in Sennheiser products have so far been
designed on a single-product or product-family basis. This has worked sufficiently well, up to the
point that separately developed protocols start to concur in nexus devices or applications, like:
• Wireless Systems Manager (PC-based control application for wireless transmission)
• Sennheiser Control Cockpit
• remote channel for Sennheiser microphones
• Media Control Systems (third party products, e.g., Crestron)
• A/V studio integration (third party products, e.g., Lawo)
• smartphone or tablet apps
• future centralised Sennheiser services
It has become evident that product-specific protocols fail to scale well in nexus products because
of the added complexity in re-implementing the same remote control functionality from a customer
point of view in a multitude of different backwards-compatible ways. It is not feasible to add more
ever different technical solutions to the existing variety --- the aim must be to define a reasonably
future-proof protocol suitable for existing as well as envisioned products, devices, and services.
A broad market evaluation of existing technical solutions was performed in a joint Sennheiser PRO
division working group. As a result, it turns out that Open Sound Control comes closest to the specif-
ic needs for an extensible, future-proof command, control, metering, and configuration protocol for
Sennheiser products.
This document describes the specific adaption of Open Sound Control to Sennheiser use, "Senn-
heiser Sound Control", SSC. The main other ingredient is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which
enhances ease-of-use and the implementation complexity for small to smallest devices.
Note that the protocol is intended for command and control. Network audio streaming is entirely out
of its scope.