Dante and AVB explained: audio over a network cable instead of a multicore

Audio over a network cable. When I first read about it, I thought: great for the big boys with a lorry full of flight cases, but not for me. I know better now. An audio network like Dante swaps that back-breaking multicore for the same little cable that sits behind your router, and that’s simply a smart move, even for a pub band or a village church.

So what exactly is an audio network?

In a traditional setup every microphone gets its own pair of cores. Bundle 24 or 32 of those pairs together and you’ve got a multicore as thick as your wrist, running from the stage to the mixing desk at the back of the venue.

With an audio network the microphones plug into a stage box on stage, where they’re converted to digital straight away and travel as data over a single, standard, thin network cable (Cat5e or Cat6) to your mixer.

The best-known name in this story is Dante, launched by Audinate in 2006. Since then, audio over Ethernet has become the standard way of working in fixed installations and in the live world. The clever thing about Dante is that it uses ordinary networking technology. The same switches, the same cables and the same connectors that the IT bloke at your work has hanging in his cabinet. Nothing exotic, then.

Oh, and… it doesn’t stop at sound. Since 2019 there’s also Dante AV, which sends video over the same network. Completely irrelevant for most bands, but for a church that wants to distribute video as well as audio, it might be just the ticket.

Dante and AVB: two names, the same idea

Alongside Dante, you’ll come across the name AVB, short for Audio Video Bridging. The basic idea is the same: audio as data over a network, rather than as an analogue signal over a thick bundle of copper. In all honesty, I’ll be sticking with Dante from here on, simply because that’s what I come across in my own work, and I’d rather tell you about something I’ve actually plugged in with my own hands.

For you, the practical question isn’t which system looks best on paper, but which language your gear speaks. So check the back of the mixer or stage box you’ve got your eye on. Dante’s big advantage here is that pretty much every major brand builds it in, and devices from different manufacturers work together without a hitch. A mixer from brand A with a stage box from brand B: no problem whatsoever.

The switch: the heart of your network

Dante runs on ordinary, off-the-shelf network switches. No special audio hardware, just a box from the computer shop. There are a few conditions, though. Gigabit is the standard; a 100 Mbps switch only works with fewer than 32 channels, and then only if it supports QoS and that’s actually switched on. Without QoS, 100 Mbps simply isn’t supported. On top of that, go for a managed switch, so you can adjust settings and see what’s happening on the network.

You don’t need to worry about capacity. A single gigabit link can carry 512 channels out and 512 channels back at 24-bit and 48 kHz. For comparison: on a good night my band needs 18 channels. Work out for yourself how much headroom that leaves (hint: loads). Incidentally, some Dante devices can be connected directly to one another in what’s called a daisy chain, so in a small setup you won’t even need a switch.

One more lesson from experience in churches and venues: keep your audio network separate from the general network. Give it its own audio LAN, without the Wi-Fi for the projector or the verger’s laptop on it. That keeps things tidy, and you know for certain that your audio has the cable all to itself.

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Cards, stage boxes and your laptop

How do you get your mixer onto the network? Often via an expansion card in the card slot at the back. Yamaha, for example, makes the NY64-D Dante card for the TF series. Other mixers have Dante on board straight from the factory. So do look it up before you order a card you don’t actually need (don’t ask me how I know).

On stage sits the stage box: a unit with XLR inputs for your microphones and outputs for your monitors and PA. Everything that goes in comes back out as network data. The stage box replaces the analogue stage box on stage, and the network cable takes over the role of the multicore. You still do the mixing at the back of the venue, just as before.

And then there’s your laptop. With Dante Virtual Soundcard, your computer joins the network without any extra hardware, recording and playing back up to 64 channels. A multitrack recording of every gig, without having to buy a separate audio interface. And for gear without a network connection, there have been small AVIO adapters since 2018, so that kit can join in too.

Routing is done with a mouse

This is where it gets fun. Plug a Dante device into the switch and it automatically appears in Dante Controller, the software you use to manage the network. You’ll see a grid: transmitters along the top, receivers down the side. Click on an intersection and channel 3 of your stage box is routed to channel 3 of your mixer. A connection like that is called a subscription. No patch cables, no fiddling about, and the network itself decides which device acts as ‘the clock’.

There’s one rule you need to remember: you can only patch between devices running at the same sample rate. Dante doesn’t convert sample rates, so if you try to connect 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz, you’ll get a clear error message. Different sample rates can coexist on the same network, they just won’t talk to each other. Bit depth is less strict: 16, 24 and 32-bit can be mixed and can even share the same audio signal.

Why pub bands and churches are leaving the analogue multicore behind too

An analogue multicore is heavy, a pain to tuck away and a nightmare to troubleshoot. If a core goes, you’re working your way through 32 pairs with a multimeter. On top of that, you lose signal and pick up noise over long distances. A Cat cable, on the other hand, is light, easy to hide along the skirting board and costs just a few quid to replace. My back, at any rate, is a big fan.

For a church, there’s something else too. The sound often needs to go to more than one place at once: the main hall, the crèche, the coffee area, an overflow room when it’s packed, or a studio where the livestream is produced. With a multicore, that means running yet another cable every time. With Dante, you hang a device on the switch and patch it in the software. Everything runs over the same network.

The same goes for a band, just on a smaller scale. One cable from stage to mixer, a stage box you can carry under your arm and a recording on your laptop every night. My old multicore is still in the shed, just in case. It hasn’t come out since.

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