Audio Networking Made Simple. And Better.

Dante™ networking technology from Audinate® provides a highly reliable, digital audio networking system with complete flexibility and true ease of use.

Dante’s architecture uses standard Internet Protocols – not just Ethernet. So, inexpensive off-the-shelf computer networking hardware is all you need to build a powerful digital audio network. Uncompromising sample-accurate performance with extremely low latency is achieved, all without limiting your network’s layout options. Dante can even be easily integrated into a building’s pre-existing network, sharing the system with normal data traffic. And if you want to do digital audio recording, processing or playback using computer-based programs, just plug the network directly in to the standard Ethernet port on a PC. A Dante software audio driver, available from Audinate for both PCs and Macs, makes your favorite audio software application look like just another Dante-enabled device to the network. No external boxes or sound cards are needed.

Dante is built in to Lake LM 26 and PLM™ Series products. No additional hardware is required. As implemented in the PLM Series hardware platform, Dante natively supports eight audio inputs and sixteen audio outputs over a single Ethernet connection. With the Lake LM 26 you’ve four audio inputs and eight audio outputs over a single Ethernet connection. Utilizing Zen™, Audinate’s automatic device discovery and system configuration protocol, a network can be set up by simply connecting multiple PLM Series units and Lake LM 26s with standard Ethernet cables.

Previous approaches to digital audio networking relied on various proprietary formats over Ethernet. In contrast, Dante takes full advantage of the latest standards-based networking technologies to deliver advanced features such as low-cost redundancy, fail-over solutions, bandwidth aggregation, and even encryption. And with Zen automatic configuration, you don’t have to allocate IP addresses, nor do you need third-party DNS or DHCP servers. There’s never a need to figure out and manually enter “magic numbers” which must be set correctly before the network passes audio. Dante makes it simple!

Also, Dante networks can take full advantage of standard high-bandwidth network backbones, including one gigabit switches and fiber optic links. By increasing the speed of the network, higher channel count and lower latency can be achieved. For example, in the network shown in the illustration, audio is distributed throughout the network with a latency of 250 microseconds.