![]() The right way to think about Dante is a complete application stack – in fact, a solution as opposed to a protocol. How should we consider Dante as a commercial option? Joshua Rush, vice president of marketing and product management, Audinate There’s an incremental cost per unit but, from a development standpoint, it was simpler – that’s why it’s been attractive to manufacturers. With AVB, as long as you’re using Avnu-certified AVB switches and, alternately, Milan-certified AVB endpoints, you literally just plug them together and they work.įrom a manufacturers’ standpoint, the Dante path was in many ways easy, I would say, because as long as you pay for Dante hardware, Audinate can help with implementation. There is always some setup and configuration associated with any Ethernet-based network to make sure the hardware is configured correctly. Due to those limitations, there’s still work that has to be done on the Dante side concerned with quality of service and other things. From the user’s standpoint, Milan is even more plug-and-play than something like Dante, precisely because of the limitations of Ethernet. And they have all the assurances, with AVB as the underlying technology, that things like timing and guarantee of bandwidth for audio are taken care of – so you don’t have to worry about audio dropouts.ĭo you still have to carry out your own implementation of the protocol? That’s what gives the industry the level of interoperability it requires, and what our customers need so that when they plug in different devices, they just work. In many ways, Milan is something that could be more fairly contrasted with Dante, because it is the application layer solution that sits on top of Ethernet, and it is stronger. What that meant was you could put devices from different manufacturers into AVB, and essentially those devices were not speaking the same language – precisely because those same manufacturers had made their own decisions. ![]() So manufacturers can make choices about stream format, how they deal with clocking, do they want to do redundancy and how are they going to do it … and essentially, for years, manufacturers that chose AVB as the solid foundation for their network implementation kind of built their own application layer on top of AVB and would make their own decisions about formatting, clocking and so on. The problem, though, is that it’s essentially a standards-based, IEEE protocol that gives a lot of flexibility in the implementation process. You could say that AVB improves the pipe through which the content flows – audio and video. None of the foundational weaknesses of Ethernet are present in AVB. It’s the reason why you need an AVB switch. Basically, anything built on Ethernet has some risks.ĪVB, by comparison, has things like timing and bandwidth reservation baked into the hardware. The reality is that if you have an Ethernet-based network and you’re trying to learn real-time audio and control over the same cable, and you end up with a lot of other data on the network, it can actually cause audio dropouts. There are some workarounds that have been developed: Precision Time Protocol DiffServ – things to try and prioritise data on an Ethernet network and make sure that real-time audio can happen. This meant that things like timing and synchronicity on the network, and also the guarantee of having bandwidth availability, were not really there. ![]() But, in fact, that switch has Ethernet weaknesses, and that’s what companies like L-Acoustics, d&b audiotechnik and Meyer Sound were concerned about – because Ethernet was not truly meant for real-time audio transport. The challenge from our perspective is that Dante is ready-made for Ethernet: users actually see a benefit in being able to use a regular Ethernet switch. Dante is a way of ensuring that all of the devices that are using it are interoperable on the Dante network. ![]()
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