AES3

[1] AES3 was jointly developed by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and so is also known as AES/EBU.

AES3 has been incorporated into the International Electrotechnical Commission's standard IEC 60958, and is available in a consumer-grade variant known as S/PDIF.

It reproduces the AES3 professional digital audio interconnect standard and the consumer version of the same, S/PDIF.

This document provides guidelines for the use of AES3, AES Recommended Practice for Digital Audio Engineering, Serial transmission format for two-channel linearly represented digital audio data.

The full details of AES-2id can be studied in the standards section of the Audio Engineering Society web site[4] by downloading copies of the AES-2id document as a PDF file.

Type I connections use balanced, three-conductor, 110-ohm twisted pair cabling with XLR connectors.

IEC 60958 Type II defines an unbalanced electrical or optical interface for consumer electronics applications.

This uses the same cabling, patching and infrastructure as analogue or digital video, and is thus common in the broadcast industry.

While samples repeat each frame time, metadata is only transmitted once per audio block.

At 48 kHz sample rate, there are 250 audio blocks per second, and 3,072,000 time slots per second supported by a 6.144 MHz biphase clock.

[12] AES3 digital audio format can also be carried over an Asynchronous Transfer Mode network.

XLR connectors, used for IEC 60958 type I connections.
BNC connector, used for AES-3id connections.
Simple representation of the protocol for both AES3 and S/PDIF