Technology Overview
Why digital audio networking?
Much of the audio equipment used today is digital inside, but the commonest way of distributing audio is as analog signals over point-to-point networks. Digital offers clear advantages over analog distribution. Multiple audio signals can be sent over a single connection, digital signals are less prone to attenuation and noise, and the degradation and delay that multiple A/D and D/A conversions introduce are reduced or avoided if the distribution, processing and mixing of audio signals is performed in the digital domain and conversion only takes place at the edge of the network.
Why hasn't digital distribution taken off before now?
Despite its advantages, digital distribution has not taken off because the digital solutions that have been offered so far have been proprietary and inflexible. Until now. Dante, the groundbreaking new digital audio networking technology from Audinate, changes all that. Dante is compatible with standard lnternet Protocols - not just Ethernet - without compromising performance. Sample-accurate synchronization and industry-leading low latency means that Dante easily handles the challenges of live professional events.
Why Dante?
With Dante, audio networks can leverage all the features and functions that have been available to computer network implementers for years - elegant and low cost redundancy, availability and fail-over solutions, bandwidth aggregation and even encryption. Audinate's Zen technology builds on and extends Zeroconf techniques into the application domain to take the hassle out of network set-up - no need to allocate IP addresses, no need to set up and manage DNS or DHCP servers before the network will operate, and equipment in the network becomes aware of the audio capabilities - such as number of channels, sample rate and bit-depth - of other nodes in the network. This means that you don't need to be a network administrator to build and run Dante based networks. Pieces of equipment that are Dante enabled automatically configure themselves and discover each other over the network. All you have to do is connect up your Dante enabled equipment via Ethernet switches, power up, set up the audio routing you want using a PC based GUI, and you are ready to go.
Unlike proprietary digital audio networking protocols Dante allows audio channels to co-exist with other data traffic. This means that if your equipment already has an Ethernet interface supporting TCP/IP for remote management and control, Audinate's Dante technology can share this interface, minimizing Bill of Materials and re-engineering costs to add state-of-the-art standards compliant digital networking.