What is Dante - and why is it in almost every rack we build?

Dante is digital audio travelling over an ordinary computer network - hundreds of channels down one cable that used to need a multicore loom as thick as your wrist. It has become the connective tissue of modern venues, and there is a reason it appears in almost every rack we commission.

What it replaces

Point-to-point analogue cabling, where every source needed its own copper path to every destination, and changing your mind meant a soldering iron. On a Dante network, routing is software: the stagebox on the pit rail can feed the console, the recording rig and the foyer relay simultaneously, and next term’s rearrangement is a configuration change, not a cabling job.

Where we deploy it

At Kelmscott Senior High School, the Allen & Heath console, its stagebox and the Q-SYS core all speak Dante across the venue network. Across the Arts and Culture Trust’s console fleet, digital audio transport - Dante among MADI and Optocore - is what lets six venues’ worth of equipment interoperate as one system.

What your IT team will ask

Sensible questions: is it on a dedicated VLAN, who owns the switches, how is the clock managed? Good news - those are answerable, documented questions, and audio that lives on a network is audio your IT team can help look after. We design the network architecture and hand over the documentation that makes that true; that is the integration discipline.