I know you are clever, but when you call Dante "working like a charm" I'd like to question that a bit.
I guess you have more experience with Dante than me, so I won't argue much. Anyway what I meant (poorly phrased
is that it works without creating any of the "audiophoolic" problems audiophools imagine
Dante:
- Will not traverse a router
- Is limited to 64 channels
Hmm. I think they wanted to play it safe. Running on a single broadcast domain they can do a lot of magical autoconfiguration without
relying on poorly supported multicast stuff.
So, well, it's designed for a building or at most campus level application.
Also I think they haven't done a bad job making sure that it can work with many "enterprise" Ethernet switches and with a reasonable
configuration it can coexist on the same infrastructure.
- Will only be routed by a stinking Windows app, also on the same LAN
What I have used is Macos based. I haven't tried Dante Domain Controller but I understand it's available on Macos as well? No Linux, though.
Or what do you mean with "routed"?
From what I understood they avoid a central "router" node per se, relying instead on a Dante Controller application that is more like an orchestrator for the capabilites in each Dante interface. That's not a bad decision.
- Is using PTPv1
- Won't easily interoperate with AES67 or Ravenna
I have used it just for mostly straightforward stuff, so no experience there. Anyway I insist, in the context of this thread the "works like a charm" means it doesn't create "audiophool" issue and I am sure audiophools that have attended live concerts in which Dante was used haven't noticed "imaginary digital issues".
- Is proprietary
- And, I don't like it.
I must agree with this. It should be an open standard instead of a proprietary solution. As for liking, I think they did a good
job for their intended usage (venue level networking, at most campus level).
But, seriously. In my application (2000+ sound sources spread over a 2000km long country), Dante is a joke, a toy. Their attempt at world domination would have been spent better in coöperation with other industry forces to build an even better AES67.
I think they played it safe taking into account the lack of networking experience in audio professionals and the awful chaos in some implementation aspects of common protocols.
So yes, I saw it's not a "WAN" protocol but still I was surprised at how easy it is to set up as long as you have decent networking knowledge.