Meeting Report: 16 February 2026 – Luke Howard on The AES67 and AES70 Protocols - Audio Engineering Society

Composer, performer, and software & hardware developer Luke Howard presented on the topic of:

The AES67 and AES70 Protocols

We gathered at Luke’s personal studio and workshop, where Section Chair, Graeme Huon welcomed us and introduced Luke, with a quick run-through of Luke’s background, revealing that Luke has a background as Internationally recognised music composer who has seen the opportunity to develop and was currently developing an IP-networked personal monitor mixer which supports the major protocols (Dante, AVB, and AES67).

Photo of Luke Howard and Paul Messick — *Luke Howard (left) speaking to fellow designer, Paul Messick (right). Photo: Rod Staples.*

Luke explained that he was self-taught on this topic, having to learn and understand it for his current project.

He then moved on to describe the current landscape, outlining the benefits of routing audio over IP networks. He noted that, using the now common Gbps Ethernet infrastructure, it provides real benefits over analog wiring or non-routable digital solutions like MADI (AES10), or earlier proprietary solutions like Ethersound, Cobranet etc. However, these benefits come at the cost of complexities related to timing and congestion.

Presentation slide entitled "Why audio media over networks"

He briefly spoke about Dante, an Australian innovation which has been around for some time and is a superset of AES67. He also discussed AVB, commenting that the industry has currently consolidated around AES67, AVB and Dante.

Luke then discussed the stringent requirements of Audio over IP (AoIP) compared to “streaming”, including Syntonisation (same frequency so you can mix sources), Synchronisation (in-phase, deterministic playout time), and Quality of Service (you want the packets to arrive in some semblance of order!)

He gave an overview of the AES67 standard, calling it a lowest-common-denominator interoperability profile indicating that it describes how to transport PTP-timestamped media packets using RTP (PTP = Precision Time Protocol, RTP = Real-time Transport Protocol)

Luke then went on to describe Precision Time Protocol and clock recovery, as well as Real-time Transport Protocol.

Presentation slide entitled "Detour: PTP overview"

Mentioning Session Discovery, he indicated that AES67 does not mandate Session Discovery leaving it up to vendors to choose their own methods, demonstrating both the Dante and AVB implementations of session discovery on his network.

Luke then spoke about Control and Monitoring, noting that AES67 does not mandate these elements of IP networked audio, however for monitoring, RTCP (RTP Control Protocol) is optional. He concluded the AES67 section of his talk with a summary of vendor support.

Presentation slide entitled "AES67: vendor support"

Moving on to the AES70 Standard, telling us that it is really for controlling things, and can be thought of as an abstraction of physical control like knobs and switches. He described it as an object-oriented model, where each device has a collection of objects, each object has a unique identifier, objects can be arranged in a hierarchy, and objects can have a kind (class).
He pointed out that AES70 defines classes, but not how they are implemented.

Luke concluded his presentation with a demonstration of a full Audio over IP implementation in his studio, playing back and controlling audio sources via software.

Lukes slides, as a PDF document, can be viewed here
https://aesmelbourne.org.au/wp-content/media/AESPres.pdf

Here is the video of the slides+audio from Luke’s presentation