A digital audio interface which passes two digital audio channels, plus embedded clocking, control and status data, with up to 24 bits per audio sample and supporting sample rates up to 384kHz.
Developed by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), it is often known as the AES-EBU interface (pronounced ay-ze-boo). Standard AES3 is connected using 3-pin XLRs with a balanced cable of nominal 110 Ohm impedance and with a signal voltage of up to 7V peak-peak. The closely related AES3-id format uses BNC connectors with unbalanced 75 Ohm coaxial cables and a 1V pk-pk signal. In both cases the datastream is structured identically to (and is broadly compartible with) S/PDIF, although some of the Channel status codes are used differently.