If you have just one Dante-enabled device, such as a DAD AX32, that you want to connect to your computer, this is fairly straightforward. It's highly modular and in theory it’s also limitless.Ĩ) How Complex Is It to Configure a Dante Network?Īs you would expect, this depends on how complex a system you want to create. If you need more devices, simply add another star formation and use a master switch to connect each star formation. Now, you can freely distribute audio channels to and from any of these devices – and if one should fail, or stop working altogether, you don’t break the signal chain, as the remaining devices will still be fully functional and able to send and receive audio streams on the network. What this means is that you use an Ethernet switch as the centrepiece and connect, say, 4 devices to it.
Audinate recommends that you design your Dante network, using a ‘Star’ topology. One of the major advantages of an AoIP network is that you can break with the traditional mindset of connecting analog devices in series. Yes, you can, but it is recommended that you don’t. However, Audinate came up with an ingenious and fully automated solution, as Dante simply hosts an ‘election’ among the devices on the network and chooses the one with the best clocking to be the master that the other units synchronise to, virtually making jitter a problem of the past. To make it even better, if you need to fine-tune the latency, you can adjust from 150 microseconds to 5 ms on a per-device basis, while keeping in mind that ultra-low settings may also affect overall performance.Ĭombining digital devices has always required a master word clock to keep everything synchronised, and this is also the case on a Dante network. And further, this applies to up to 10 switch hops. As default, there is a latency of 1ms on a Dante network – even when you run 100 meter cables between your switches. But using Dante chances are actually that you will be far better off. Sure, latency is always present – as it is in your current setup. With potentially super long cable runs, how does that affect latency on the network? Well, in so many words, latency is not really an issue. Then your distance is not to be measured in meters, but kilometers or miles. Should you need to go even farther than that, you certainly can – you just need to make your connections through fiber. In a Dante system, you can run these cables up to 100 meters between each switch in your combined network. These are standard cables that are also used for transmitting other types of data, including the words you are currently reading and if you should decide to send these words to a printer. You have to use Gigabit-rated cables, which means either CAT5E or CAT6 cables. In other words, you could run up to 512 bidirectional audio channels at 24 bit/48kHz on one port – and way more on the entire network. On a Gigabit network, these 64 audio channels only take up 1/8 of the bandwidth on a port. But to give you an idea of the capacity, please consider the following: 64 audio channels in 24 bit / 48 kHz takes up only 74 mbit/sec on a single network port. It’s merely a matter of adding more interface devices and Ethernet switches. In theory, you can add as many audio channels to a Dante network as you want. No, since it is ‘only’ a digital transportation system, not even a single bit is altered – hence there is absolutely no change in audio quality, as it is being distributed between devices on the network.ģ) What About Bandwidth. Rather, it aims at answering a handful of the most common questions that audio professionals have when it comes to AoIP.ĭante is simply a bit-for-bit audio transportation system that utilises standard Ethernet equipment to physically connect devices on a network. This is by no means meant as an effort to take you through the in-depth details of Dante. DAD have chosen to support Audinate’s Dante and will focus exclusively on their protocol in this article.
There are a number of different AoIP protocols around. While it is still a relatively new area for many audio professionals, it has come to stay, and looking a few years down the road, it will most likely have become the norm rather than the exception.
Continuing our collaboration with Partner Brands supplying content for the community, Kim Bang wrote an excellent piece for our partners at DAD, reproduced here with kind permission:Īudio over IP (AoIP) has become a hot topic in recent years – and for a good reason.
0 kommentar(er)
