Tonight we had an amazing opportunity to learn from CRAS instructor Robert Brock
about one of the up and coming heavy hitters in the audio industry the Dante protocol.
Brock gave us a detailed basic overview of what Dante is and how it is affecting many
different facets of our industry. We learned that Dante is a new and very affordable
protocol of transporting audio over ip address, with the ability to link multiple devices
and laptops together via ethernet switches to have a total of an astounding 512
channels of audio being transmitted over a single cat 5 cable. Brock had a few students
download a free trial version and gave a demonstration on how user friendly it is to use
the protocol and how quick you can link multiple devices using a single ethernet cable,
eliminating the expense of using traditional analog snake connections. We also learned
opposed to the MADI protocol where you can not pick and choose which channels of
audio you want to use, that with Dante you can choose which channels you want to use.
Brock also showed us some of the benefits Dante offers, like the fact that it chooses the
most accurate master clock source for you, and if that source where to fail it
automatically picks up another master clock source. We also learned that Dante
automatically measures delay times between devices and configures the signals to
arrive at the same time, allowing much ease for the user not having to configure latency
compensation times. Brock spoke of a large number of companies that are beginning to
incorporate Dante into their newest products such as Yamaha digital FOH consoles,
Shure, Audio Technica, and Focus Right interfaces and mic pres, also the ability to use
existing ip addresses and pre wired ethernet cables to transmit signal. Overall this was
an amazing opportunity for us as students to have a heads up of this new up and
coming protocol within the industry, and to hopefully one day use the information we
learned to get work and have a better understanding of the Dante protocol.
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