DIP Switches and Set buttons:
There are 4 DIP switches and 3 set buttons on the rear panel of NBB-1616
breakbox. With them, you are allowed to manipulate or setup the NBB-
1616 breakbox without any controller or computer involved.
P2P Pairing
button: long-press the button for longer than 2 seconds
or until a SET shown on meter panel, the NBB-1616 enters P2P
(peer-to-peer) pairing procedure. In the circumstance, the NBB-1616
browses or searches if there is any other NBB-1616 or other UNiKA
device in the linked network. If there is any qualified device found,
the NBB-1616 will tries to subscribe every channels on the remote device peer-to-peer, and vice versa.
Which means, if successfully pairing, all the input and output channels of the local and remote devices
are routed each other in peer-to-peer style. The whole pairing process does not need any dedicated
controller or computer in between. The whole process even does not need any DHCP server and Ethernet
switch in between if you simply want to pair two NBB-1616s to transceive audio in between. That is to
say, you can pair two NBB-1616s to properly work as digital snake right out of the box by simply
connecting them with a Ethernet cable and pressing the P2P pairing button on one of the NBB-1616s.
Note:
During pairing process, the NBB-1616 waits for 2 seconds to see if there is any other
Dante-enabled device in the network. Sometimes, the NBB-1616 does not receive any
response from the network in the time frame and can fail to complete the pairing process,
even there is actually one or more than one Dante-enabled devices in the network. In such
circumstance, please feel free to try again by pressing the P2P Pairing button once again.
Note:
If there is more than one Dante-enabled device in the network, the NBB-1616 breakbox
randomly picks up one for pairing. If you need to have NBB-1616 breakbox to be paired with
a particular device, please temporarily remove all other devices from network or simply turn
them off temporarily.
Note:
Two devices can transceive audio stream in between only if both of them are
configured to manipulate audio in the same sample rate. The automatically pairing process of
NBB-1616 can successfully pair itself to a device working in different sample rate. Once the
pairing process is complete, in the circumstance, the NBB-1616 will initial an instruction to
the paired device to try to request a sample rate change in the paired device to match the
sample rate setting of the NBB-1616 itself. However, the change request to the paired device
may be discarded by the paired device for whatever reason. If this is the case, the audio
stream will not be successfully transceived in between until you manually configure one of
the pairing or paired device to match the sample rate setting of the other.
Note:
By default, the NBB-1616 encodes audio in PCM 24-bit. The NBB-1616 can pair to a
device with PCM coding in bit depth other than 24-bit. The audio data is then left aligned
during transceiving between devices with audio encoded in different bit depth. If NBB-1616
is transceiving audio stream with a device operating in 16-bit PCM coding, for example, the
16-bit audio data received from the paired device will be left shifted 8 bits and padded with 8
zero on the LSB side, whereas the 8 LSB bits of 24-bit audio data transmitted from NBB-
1616 will be truncated to fit the 16-bit width in the paired device. I.e., the MSB side of data
bits are always preserved and left justified.
Redundant/Daisy-Chain
set button: long-press the button for longer than 2 seconds or until a SET
shown on meter panel, the NBB-1616 toggles network topology setting between switch (i.e., daisy-
chain) mode and redundant mode. Since the NBB-1616 need to reboot itself for the new setting taking
effect, please be patient to wait until you see the Redundant status LED on the front panel toggled.
Note:
Although toggle the Redundant/Daisy-Chain mode won't change the audio routing
setting, you need to pay attention to make sure the network cabling is changed accordingly
ahead of the mode change, otherwise you may crash the whole network. Basically, you can't
mix cabling between primary network and secondary network in redundant mode; and you
can't connect any two devices with two cables to both primary and secondary RJ45s
simultaneously in switch/daisy-chain mode.
