Dante + PA1U?

Tech Talk
1

I’m reworking my playback rig and wondering if there’s a world where I can have a PlayAUDIO1U and Dante capabilities in the same rack - or, barring that, a Dante-compatible interface that provides redundancy in a similar price range to the PA1U.

Our PM/FOH is starting to get into Dante and wants to use Dante for our setup - I see the benefits of this, as well.

My only issue is if/when we play shows with older consoles where we won’t be able to use an ethernet cable to send Dante to FOH.

My plan is to have a PA1U for shows where we need to send analog outs for playback, but more commonly use DVS to send tracks to compatible consoles.

From my research, it looks like any reliable Dante-compatible interfaces are far more expensive than the PA1U, hence the workaround.

So this is a multi-faceted question aimed at gear heads who love creating solutions to these kinds of problems:

  1. Is there a Dante-compatible interface with redundancy capabilities that’s in a similar price range to the PA1U?
  2. If not, will I be able to rely on just AbleSet/AbleNet to provide full automatic fail-over redundancy using DVS? What is the network setup required for that? I’m defining “full” redundancy as any reason why computer A might stop playback - audio corruption, network loss, power off, etc. - and automatically fails over to the B computer without needing to switch to the B computer manually.

Totally open to rethinking all of this too, let’s nerd out on gear!

1 Like
2

Hey @tyr4nts,

The cheapest option for your use case would probably be DirectOut’s EXBOX.MD which supports failing over between two Dante inputs of 32 channels each. This would work in combination with DVS, so you’d connect both computers and the EXBOX.MD to the same network, route each computer’s audio to it, and then route its outputs to FoH and wherever you need them.

This device is supported by AbleSet, so you can see the current failover status and switch between both computers in AbleSet’s web app, similar to how it works with a PlayAUDIO1U.

If you need more channels, you can take a look at Digital Audio Denmark’s Core256 which can fail over between 128 channels of Dante for each computer or 256 channels per computer if you connect one via Dante and one via Thunderbolt. This one isn’t supported in AbleSet yet, but I’d love to integrate it in the future.

Using just DVS doesn’t work, unfortunately, as there needs to be some device that takes care of the failover between both computers.

There are no Dante solutions in the same price range as the PlayAUDIO1U, but I hope these recommendations still work for you.

Let me know if this helps :slight_smile: