Bring Your Analog Gear into the 21st Century with Dante

Infrastructure is typically a word we hear from politicians, not audio engineers. But the demands of modern production, for both live and studio, are changing that. To make a living in the audio business, we all have to be far more flexible about the kind of work we are doing. It may be a recording job today and live sound support for a political rally tomorrow. This means we need to get used to the idea of backbone networks and field deployment of these kinds of technologies. Simply put, flexibility is not a luxury anymore; it’s a necessity.
While there are a couple of competing technologies, like AES50 and AVB, currently the most ubiquitous platform is Dante. The best way to think of these networking technologies is as glue. They replace snakes and splitters and a whole range of cabling. They are also infinitely more flexible and expandable.
Picture a 200-foot, 24-channel snake. It weighs a ton and is hard to repair, and if you need 28 channels (4 more) coming from the stage, you are stuck running additional cables the entire distance to add those missing channels. This is not the picture of efficiency.
Or what if the client tells me at the last minute that they also need a multichannel recording of this project? I don’t own an audio splitter, and the console on location doesn’t record. How can I accomplish that?
Let’s imagine that whole scenario with Dante instead. I brought a 300-foot reel of Cat 6 to the gig, so the stage run is easy, and the cable only weighs about 6 pounds. I have two 16-input stage boxes, so I just connect them together with a network switch and all those channels travel down that same thin cable I brought. Recording the show is no problem. I just take a short Cat 5 and run it from the switch to a computer running Virtual Sound Card, and no splitter is necessary.
That is the benefit of having complete control of your own infrastructure. Things that were difficult become simple. Any limitations on the technology really come down to situations where just a few channels of audio are in remote spaces. It’s not cost effective to put a big additional Dante box, like the Yamaha Rio, at a convenient location for just a channel or two of audio.

Figure 1: The Yamaha Rio Dante Digital Network Remote I/O Unit

Recently, Audinate has launched a range of small Dante adapters that function as on- and off-ramps for the Dante network. If you have a dual IEM transmitter onstage, such as the Sennheiser SR2050IEM, one of these Dante interfaces suddenly makes a lot of sense. Or if you have a piece of gear that doesn’t support Dante, like an analog mixer you love or a powered speaker, it is suddenly far easier to integrate those pieces into your system.

Figure 2: Audinate makes a whole range of one- and two-channel Dante interfaces.

I am also no longer dependent on having a console such as the Mackie Axis with Dante networking built-in to use this technology at a small scale. With a network switch and a couple of these AVIO units, I can add this capability to an existing system.
Starting at $99, there are in and out versions in analog, and I/O versions in digital (AES and USB). Add a couple of these in your kit, along with an additional network switch
like the Yamaha SWR2100P-5G, and your system just got a whole lot more capable. A switch that features PoE (Power over Ethernet) also means that supported pieces of equipment don’t require a power supply. A single run of cheap, lightweight Cat 5e cabling supplies signal and power wherever you need it.

This kind of flexibility means that when someone comes up with a crazy request, you can almost always say yes! So if you want to talk through adding the flexibility of Dante to your system, give your Sweetwater Sales Engineer a call at (800) 222-4700.
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