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[richard_cooper]

I'm looking for the smallest available 5 port switch with POE suitable to drive Audinate AVIOs on 4 ports Any recommendations? I'm thinking something in the form factor of a Netgear FS105 but obviously with POE and suitable for Dante?

Ideas/experience?

Thanks,
Richard

[John P. Farrell]

I'm looking for the smallest available 5 port switch with POE suitable to drive Audinate AVIOs on 4 ports Any recommendations? I'm thinking something in the form factor of a Netgear FS105 but obviously with POE and suitable for Dante?

Ideas/experience?

Thanks,
Richard

I've had good luck with these netgear switches when on a budget:

https://www.netgear.com/business/products/switches/web-managed/gigabit-web-managed-switch.aspx#tab-models

JF

[Taylor Hall]

Anything gigabit from Netgear or TP-Link will work fine, they have both managed and unmanaged models at various price points.

[Russell Ault]

Anything gigabit from Netgear or TP-Link will work fine, they have both managed and unmanaged models at various price points.

I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. Many (all?) of Netgear's unmanaged options have Dante-killing EEE enabled on them, with no way to turn it off (because they are unmanaged). I don't know the TP-Link product line as well, but these days I tend to assume that any unmanaged switch will have EEE enabled on it, which makes the whole category a no-go for me for Dante.

On the bright side, managed switches have never been cheaper. I'm partial to Netgear, personally.

-Russ

[brian maddox]

Anything gigabit from Netgear or TP-Link will work fine, they have both managed and unmanaged models at various price points.

I agree with this.  I'd go with one of the popular name brands.  They're cheap enough and they make so many of them that they've pretty much worked out the QC issues. I'd also go with an unmanaged switch for this application.  I'm of the mindset that there is a point of diminishing returns with managed switch for Dante applications, and a 5-port drop switch with a handful of Dante flows definitely doesn't need the complexity that a managed switch introduces.  I've used basic Netgear switches hundreds of times for this kind of thing and never had an issue.  I've also used Cisco switches dozens of times and HAD issues.  To the point where if it's not MY switch, i'd rather see a cheap unmanaged off the shelf switch than a fancy pants Cisco managed switch since at least then i know what i'm getting.

I'd pay more attention to total POE amperage needed and what kind of power supply the thing has.  Power supplies that take up three outlets or are bigger than the switch itself or some oddball voltage will bite you far more often than the data bandwidth or whatever.

I would say that i've often used 5-port switches and then run out of holes.  If you can get an 8-port that is only a little bit bigger, i'd do that.  It's kinda like power strips.  If you know you need 4 outlets, a 6 outlet power strip is gonna prove to be too small at least 90 percent of the time.  There's always something to add you didn't think of.

[richard_cooper]

I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. Many (all?) of Netgear's unmanaged options have Dante-killing EEE enabled on them, with no way to turn it off (because they are unmanaged). I don't know the TP-Link product line as well, but these days I tend to assume that any unmanaged switch will have EEE enabled on it, which makes the whole category a no-go for me for Dante.

On the bright side, managed switches have never been cheaper. I'm partial to Netgear, personally.

-Russ

Ahh, have to agree completely here, and that's why I'm asking the question. Obviously I need a switch CONFIRMED to not have EEE (or 802.3az) or for it to be disablaable. Difsev QOS would be great, but probably not essential in this situation.

[Taylor Hall]

I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. Many (all?) of Netgear's unmanaged options have Dante-killing EEE enabled on them, with no way to turn it off (because they are unmanaged). I don't know the TP-Link product line as well, but these days I tend to assume that any unmanaged switch will have EEE enabled on it, which makes the whole category a no-go for me for Dante.

On the bright side, managed switches have never been cheaper. I'm partial to Netgear, personally.

-Russ

I personally haven't seen Dante falter from that with any of our network hardware in testing. We purposefully tried everything at our disposal in the shop ranging from $5 dumb hubs/switches and consumer routers all the way up to the Cisco equipment we would ultimately use just to see what could be cobbled together in an absolute worst-case scenario. So we either got lucky with the unmanaged gear we tested (which I know had netgear in the mix) or it only coalesces with larger deployments than the handful of Dante devices we were using. Of course that's not to say that it won't cause issues, I just haven't run into it. The only networking non-negotiable I've seen mentioned for Dante is IGMP in regards to multicast, so I guess I'll add EEE to the list and adjust our documentation.

Brian brings up another good point about getting more ports than you think you'd need. Going from a 5 port to an 8 port model is only a $20-30 difference and could save your butt and also give you way more routing options for your network topology.

[brian maddox]

I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. Many (all?) of Netgear's unmanaged options have Dante-killing EEE enabled on them, with no way to turn it off (because they are unmanaged). I don't know the TP-Link product line as well, but these days I tend to assume that any unmanaged switch will have EEE enabled on it, which makes the whole category a no-go for me for Dante.

On the bright side, managed switches have never been cheaper. I'm partial to Netgear, personally.

-Russ

Actually, you're right, at least mostly.  There are plenty of unmanaged options that do not have EEE enabled, but you do have to pay attention.  It's become such a habit for me to look for EEE that i forgot to mention it.  It absolutely IS the one thing guaranteed to ruin your Dante day if you don't catch it...

[Russell Ault]

[...] Difsev QOS would be great, but probably not essential in this situation.

I'd encourage you to take Dante Level 3 Certification (it's online and free!) before you enable any QOS on a Dante network. Audinate's advice is basically "you probably don't need QOS (definitely not in a show network, even with some shared traffic), but if you do need QOS for some reason (like your IT department is forcing you) make absolutely sure is configured as X because otherwise your latency across the network will stop being deterministic and it will stop passing audio". (I don't remember offhand what the X is because I don't use QOS, but Audinate is more than happy to tell you.)

I personally haven't seen Dante falter from that with any of our network hardware in testing. We purposefully tried everything at our disposal in the shop ranging from $5 dumb hubs/switches and consumer routers all the way up to the Cisco equipment we would ultimately use just to see what could be cobbled together in an absolute worst-case scenario. So we either got lucky with the unmanaged gear we tested (which I know had netgear in the mix) or it only coalesces with larger deployments than the handful of Dante devices we were using. [...]

You've basically been lucky. EEE-enabled switches will kill Dante (as I understand it the Dante clock is basically the same packet over and over, and part of EEE is dropping what appears to be redundant packets, so the clock packets get dropped). Hubs are probably not a great idea (unless your Dante network is really small). Un-managed switches used to be a solid choice, and older un-managed switches (from before EEE was released) are still a good bet. Unfortunately, a lot of manufacturers saw energy-saving technology as a way to sell more units (because, let's be honest, EEE on a 5-port switch isn't really going to save you all that much power) and puked it all over their product lines, to the detriment of all Dante-loving folk. Worse, because Dante is about the only real-world application that cares about EEE, most manufacturers don't make too big a deal about the difference, so there are some switches where Rev 1 won't be EEE-enabled but Rev 3 will be.

[...] The only networking non-negotiable I've seen mentioned for Dante is IGMP in regards to multicast, so I guess I'll add EEE to the list and adjust our documentation.

IGMP snooping is often negotiable for Dante, especially in smaller networks. Because Dante defaults to unicast streams a lot of Dante networks don't produce significant multicast traffic (which is where IGMP snooping has any effect). Even if you are configuring multicast streams you'll only run into trouble if you're sending enough multicast channels around to saturate Ethernet links (most likely caused by having some 100Mbit devices on the network); at that point IGMP snooping becomes mandatory. Of course if you're buying a managed switch it will almost certainly support IGMP snooping anyway; I tend to leave it disabled though unless I find myself in a situation where I really need it.

Actually, you're right, at least mostly.  There are plenty of unmanaged options that do not have EEE enabled, but you do have to pay attention.  It's become such a habit for me to look for EEE that i forgot to mention it.  It absolutely IS the one thing guaranteed to ruin your Dante day if you don't catch it...

I came to the conclusion a while ago that the price difference between decent managed and un-managed switches is smaller than the value I place on avoiding the hassle of having to track down wither this revision of this switch has EEE or not. Plus, for that extra money you get a much more powerful tool: IGMP snooping, VLANs (I'm partial to VLANs), the works. It's my own little version of buy once, cry once.

-Russ

[richard_cooper]

I'd encourage you to take Dante Level 3 Certification (it's online and free!) before you enable any QOS on a Dante network. Audinate's advice is basically "you probably don't need QOS (definitely not in a show network, even with some shared traffic), but if you do need QOS for some reason (like your IT department is forcing you) make absolutely sure is configured as X because otherwise your latency across the network will stop being deterministic and it will stop passing audio". (I don't remember offhand what the X is because I don't use QOS, but Audinate is more than happy to tell you.)

Yes, I've done the certification, and agree that I don't need QOS in this particular instance, which is why I said it's not essential.

I was more hoping that someone had a goto recommendation that fits my needs. I've been caught at least once by a switch that had no mention of EEE in any of it's documentation available online but turned out to have it and couldn't be disabled.

Richard

[Greg Bellotte]

using one of these occasionally with some neutrik 2x2...no issues
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074ZTNHNW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[John L Nobile]

using one of these occasionally with some neutral 2x2...no issues
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074ZTNHNW/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That's a 10/100 Mps switch. Dante recommends Gigabit switches and QoS when using 100 Mbs. This is a good read

https://www.audinate.com/networks-and-switches

Here's an excerpt:

What is the minimum requirement for switches in a Dante network?
All Ethernet switches are capable of working with Dante. However, please be aware that there are some features on some kinds of switches that will allow you to build larger and more reliable Dante networks.

While Gigabit switches are recommended, 100Mbps switches may be used in limited scenarios.

For channel counts of 32 or more, Gigabit switches are essential.  QoS is required when using Dante in networks that have 100Mbps devices.  QoS is also recommended for Gigabit switches on networks that share data with services other than Dante.
For lower channel count (<32) applications, a 100Mbps switch may be used as long as it supports proper QoS, and QoS is active. The use of 100Mbps switches without QoS is not recommended or supported.

My day job is in IT and we never buy cheap switches anymore. They fail early and always need to be reset to clear them. DLink was the worst. If you need a switch to run critical audio, don't cheap out. We seem to like Dell switches here but an 8 port managed PoE switch will set you back about $400 CDN. I would tend to look at what the IT world uses for their networks. Cisco, Dell and HP seem to dominate.

[Mike Eiseman]

Richard -

have you looked at Yamaha's SWR-series of switches? https://usa.yamaha.com/products/proaudio/network_switches/index.html

[ProSoundWeb Community]