Bryan, thanks for all of the great advice. I thought that Dante wanted all of the switches to be the same and on the same firmware level? I may have misunderstood that. Also, am I correct when I say that Dante and for instance Crown System Architect can run on the same switches and CAT6 cable?
Thanks
Bill
Bill,
Hopefully someone will chime in if I am wrong... but no, Dante doesn't care about firmware or switch make/model. My main switch racks is the Cisco guys and I star out from there to Toughswitch stuff. I don't daisy chain from one switch to another. On a basic level, Dante cares about some things like speed, energy efficient ethernet and QoS (when running a slower network). As long as you have gigabit and EEE free you will likely be fine. We should all prefer uniformity and high quality but Audinate pretty much says "who cares" outside of those three features.
In the field, most sound companies will have a hard time pushing Dante and the cable to the limit. I mean, the system can carry 1024 channels (512 each way) before giving up. Even running a 64 input show with 32 monitor mixes and 2 multitracks, LRSF and 100 delay towers stacked back for miles, I still have a few hundred channels to kill and am only using half of my bandwidth.
also, someone mentioned the auto IP for a dante network.... that 169.254.x.x thing.... that is just for the primary network. the secondary has to be 172.31.x.x. So if you are planning static IPs, make sure you don't deviate from that scheme. That kicked me in the butt for a couple of hours when finally setting up my secondary.
edit because i forget to mention:
A dante network isn't just a dante network. you can run dante and all of your other audio gear on the same network, with the same cables. you can even have it plugged in to the internet so you can email your mom, but don't.
your network at a show is no different than another network except it hopefully isnt connected to the internet. at home you have a few computers, a printer, some phones and tablets, your tv and roku all on the network, all sending data to and fro. that is your audio network. wire it the same. forget the fact that your brain has been thinking in analog cable mode for a long time. one cable, one job at a time. we are past that. one cable to rule them all.
keep in mind, the more you put on the network, the more you need to prioritize the dante packets on the primary network. the secondary will only carry the audio and wont get cluttered the same way.
