Audio over IP (AoIP) has become a hot topic in recent years – and for a good reason. While it is still a relatively new area for many audio professionals, it has come to stay, and looking a few years down the road, it will most likely have become the norm rather than the exception.

First in our 8-part series on Getting Started with Dante:
- Moving from analog to digital networking
- Working with Dante products from multiple manufacturers
- Dante performance
- Basic network equipment requirements for Dante
- Basic networking knowledge and Dante

Getting Started with Dante: 4. Dante Virtual Soundcard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K36uBZXnWhk

4th in our series for Dante audio networking beginners:
- What is Dante Virtual Soundcard?
- Stopping and starting Dante Virtual Soundcard
- ASIO and WDM drivers for Windows
- Configuring Dante Virtual Soundcard
- Dante Virtual Soundcard demonstration: multitrack recording

Giving the AVIO USB Dante Adaptor the test drive. It delivers what it promises.

Dante Via is easy-to-use software that delivers unprecedented routing of computer-based audio, allowing a wide range of applications and devices to be networked and interconnected, easily and inexpensively.

Dante Via enhances any USB or Firewire audio device with network connectivity, allowing you to easily expand your Dante system with hundreds of readily available products. Simply connect your device and check “Enable Dante” in the Dante Via interface, and it’s ready to connect with your entire network, unrestrained by short cable runs.

Works on Windows and Macintosh computers

In recent years, Infocomm has become the go-to show for the convergence of Audio, Video, Networking, and Control (all the areas I follow most closely), and this year was yet another great show.

My primary focus in my work and teaching is live sound, and walking the audio areas of the floor the hottest topic of conversation amongst my live sound-focused friends was Audinate’s proprietary Dante audio network transmission system, and of course IEEE’s open Audio Video Bridging (AVB) standard.

Work on AVB started back in 2005, and I first saw a demo of it at Infocomm 2009
It seemed like a great idea, and I was a big proponent of it. However, by 2013 I was concerned that the AVB development was dragging behind the needs of the live sound market

after AES in November of 2013, after the release of the AES-67 inter-operability standard, I peered into my crystal ball and wrote, “Audinate’s Dante has won the race, while AVB is still being tweaked by the mechanics over in the pit lane. “. That was further reinforced by what I my visit to Infocomm last year, and even more so this year

Dante was in so many places on the trade show floor that Audinate was running a scavenger hunt promotion and were giving away T-shirts to people who could find a certain number of products.

While there is still one big player in our live sound market–Meyer–holding onto AVB, it seems almost all the other big live sound market players have jumped onto the Dante bandwagon. And this includes Avid, with their upcoming S6-L mixer; this is particularly interesting development since Avid was one of the few companies selling an AVB-based mixer system. And it seems that Harman (JBL, etc) is heading towards Dante as well.

when everyone else is using something different, and your users need to connect, we can’t stay analog forever. And its just not likely the rest of the world will go Meyer’s way and suddenly switch to AVB tomorrow.

So where are we today? I no longer need my crystal ball–Dante is currently the defacto audio networking solution for the live sound industry.

So where does that leave AVB? I talked to a guy from Extreme Networks at the show, and it seems they are still the only company making AVnu certified switches, and the ability to carry AVB is still an option that costs about $400 per switch.
“more cool AVB stuff is on the way real soon”, I’m afraid I’ve heard that too long–I just can’t even imagine what the product or solution would be that would make everyone drop Dante and go to AVB.

But AVB still has a potential (and fascinating) future: As I wrote back in January of this year, It seems that AVB and the AVnu alliance has shifted to offer a solution for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), and this was reinforced on the show floor with an AVB/TSN graphic, which listed only a handful of live sound companies and Audinate itself, who list some of same companies as licencees

Also the automotive market is apparently very interested in AVB/TSN as well–using special connectors and AVB they can use Ethernet to save lots of weight in cars, which is a big deal.

In 2009, that something new was Audio-Video Bridging (AVB), an IEEE open standard for transmitting time-synchronized audio and video over Ethernet, using special network switches. I’ve long been a supporter of open standards, and I was a big supporter of AVB. But after the 2013 AES convention, four years after that very public roll out, it seemed to me that AVB had been too slow out of the gate, and that Audinate’s proprietary Dante audio networking technology had already won dominance in the live sound market.

Everything I saw at this year’s Infocomm further supports that conclusion.

There’s actually less on display this year than last year. There was the (very nice) AVB-based Avid S3L console, some interfaces, and switches from Extreme Networks, who, as of now, are the only company to get AVNU-certified switches onto the market. The Extreme switches seem very nice, but when I priced them recently I was surprised to learn that the AVB option costs over $300+ extra per switch. With so little AVB product available for our industry, what does that $300 get me?

Here, there was lots of stuff from popular pro audio manufacturers that you can buy today, all connected together using standard switches and patched with a consistent interface. And in this all-day Dante love fest, they showed real world, completed installations, and lots of new, working stuff. My friend Jamie Anderson from Rational Acoustics presented on a recent SMAART class he taught where he replaced his old analog signal distribution system with Dante, saying it saved him several hours on the class because it “just worked”:’

So, it seems the prediction I made after peering into my crystal ball back in November still holds up: “… Audinate’s Dante has won the race, while AVB is still being tweaked by the mechanics over in the pit lane.”

Almost everything you list in your comment–Cisco’s involvement in AVB (you still can’t buy a Cisco AVB switch, as far as I know), Yamaha with a beta AVB system (never got beyond beta, as far as I know), AVB in Mac’s (still can’t use it), etc etc, was all true last year, when I was more optimistic about AVB’s prospects.