Before Audio-over-IP (AoIP), sending a 64-channel multitrack mix from the stage to the Front of House (FOH) console required dragging a 100-pound analog copper snake across a venue. Today, that entire 64-channel mix fits effortlessly onto a single Cat5e ethernet cable running standard gigabit network traffic.
The two most prominent protocols enabling this are Audinate's Dante and the Audio Engineering Society's open standard, AES67.
Dante: The Apple of AoIP
Dante is a proprietary, closed ecosystem created by Audinate. It is wildly successful because it "just works." If you buy a Yamaha console with Dante, and a Shure wireless mic system with Dante, you simply plug them into the same switch, open the Dante Controller software, and click the intersection grid to route the audio.
Audinate handles all the complex network engineering under the hood automatically: Bonjour discovery protocols, PTPv1 clock elections, and dynamic latency negotiation. However, because it is proprietary, manufacturers must buy Dante chipset licenses from Audinate, which increases hardware costs.
AES67: The Interoperability Standard
AES67 is not a complete ecosystem; it is a baseline interoperability standard. It dictates exactly how uncompressed PCM audio packets should be structured over RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) and how PTPv2 (IEEE 1588-2008) should handle the network clocking.
Because it is an open standard, it allows completely different technologies like Ravenna (used in Lawo broadcast consoles), Livewire (Axia), and Q-SYS to talk to one another.
The Catch: Dante CAN do AES67
The beauty of modern networked audio is that nearly all modern Dante devices feature an "AES67 Mode" toggle. When activated, the Dante chip creates a secondary PTPv2 clocking boundary and transmits standard AES67 multicast flows.
However, Dante uses mDNS for discovery, while many broadcast systems (Ravenna, Q-SYS) use SAP (Session Announcement Protocol). This means that even if the audio is compatible, the devices might not "see" each other in their respective controllers.
When connecting a Dante console to a Ravenna stagebox, you often need a "SAP Monitor" or "Rav-Dante Bridge" software. This tool listens for the AES67 multicast announcements and translates them into a format that Dante Controller can understand, making the "invisible" streams appear in your routing grid.
The QoS Networking Danger
The single biggest headache engineers face when mixing Dante and AES67 on the same 1GbE network switch is QoS (Quality of Service) DSCP mappings.
- Dante expects PTPv1 Clock packets to be DSCP 56 (CS7), and Audio packets to be DSCP 46 (EF).
- AES67 defaults to PTPv2 Clock packets on DSCP 46 (EF), and Audio packets on DSCP 34 (AF41).
If you don't manually map these DSCP trust queues on your managed Cisco or Netgear switch, Dante audio packets will collide with AES67 clock packets in the priority queue, causing catastrophic clock drift, crackles, and audio drops.