What is a Direct Route Conference in the Gateway Editor?

To set a conference as ‘direct’ go to the Conference Advanced Editor for a specific conference and tick the ‘HSL Direct Routes’ check box, when checked the ‘Inhibits’ tab will now appear as shown in the image below:

By setting this option the conference no longer uses multicast IP traffic but instead all the routes within the conference are made individually between the members in the conference, if the routes are between hosts and are not HSL connected then the routes will now be unicast IP traffic.

Once the ‘HSL Direct Routes’ checkbox is ticked a new tab called ‘inhibits’ now appears. The routes are now made individually and it is possible to use the Inhibits grid to inhibit individual routes within the conference.

Apart from the advantage of being able to inhibit who hears who within the conference, the routes are now over the HSL bus at 20 Hz  -20 kHz audio and not over IP using DSP and a G722 codec for example. This will give better audio quality and near zero audio latency.

One point to note is in the unlikely event the HSL link between the hosts was to fail, the routes between the hosts would now be using DSP channels and the IP connection. Depending on the size of the conference and the number of ports communicating between hosts the number of DSP channels being used may be close the 64(32)* DSP channel limit.