Audinate’s Dante, the de facto standard for digital audio networking, recently reached an impressive milestone with more than 3,000 different products now incorporating Dante for audio-over-IP connectivity. According to research from RH Consulting, 3,034 Dante-enabled devices are available from 361 different manufacturers as of January 2021. The data from RH Consulting indicates Dante is the protocol of choice in more than 91 percent of the networked audio products currently on the market.
Audinate announced in January that the total number of OEM brands now working with Dante has reached 518, with 133 OEMs currently developing their first Dante-enabled product.
“It’s inspiring to see how many manufacturers and product lines have aligned around Dante,” said Joshua Rush, SVP of Marketing at Audinate. “And with 133 OEMs working on their first Dante-enabled product, it’s exciting to think about how much more the number will grow. This milestone shows how important Dante has become in creating an interoperable audio ecosystem.”
The numbers further solidify Dante as the industry-leading protocol for digital audio networking. Dante enables the distribution of hundreds of uncompressed, multi-channel digital audio channels via standard Ethernet networks, with near-zero latency and perfect synchronization. Dante also allows audio, control, and all other data to coexist effectively on the same network.
To make it easy for manufacturers to incorporate Dante into their product line, Audinate continues to innovate and add new solutions to the Dante portfolio. These include:
• The Dante Broadway chip is a perfect blend of performance, features, and economy for mid-tier products such as multi-channel amplifiers, smaller DSP units, hardware interfaces, and compact mixing consoles. Broadway blends the small form factor of Ultimo products with the most popular features of the powerful Brooklyn II module, including latency as low as 0.25ms and support for Gigabit Ethernet. With up to 16×16 channels, quarter-millisecond latency, Gigabit speeds, and plenty of computing power, Broadway is the foundation for Dante products in many industry segments.
• Dante Embedded Platform is a software implementation of Dante that provides the tools manufacturers need to make AV as software a reality. It comes complete with an SDK providing the tools needed to develop Dante-enabled products built upon 32-bit and 64-bit Arm Cortex-A processors using a Linux operating system and supporting online license activation for OEMs. The SDK allows manufacturers to validate their own designs for performance and capability, ensuring solid reliability for end-users. A Dante Embedded Platform SDK for x86-based audio products is anticipated for release in the near future.
• The Dante Ultimo chip extends Dante networking to endpoint products such as powered speakers, amplifiers, wall plates, and break-out boxes. As with all Audinate products, Ultimo has been designed for quick and easy integration and is supported by a comprehensive network-side API and a range of control interfaces. The accompanying Dante Ultimo Product Development Kit is a fully-featured, standalone hardware development platform that facilitates designing and testing methods for integrating Dante Ultimo into products.
• The Dante Brooklyn II module provides a complete, ready-to-use Dante interface and can equip a networked audio device with as many as 64 channels of bi-directional digital streaming. The Dante API and accompanying Dante Brooklyn II Product Development Kit allow for the creation of custom software that can be used for automatic routing, labelling of signals, custom control, and monitoring.
Audinate complements these offerings with software solutions that make Dante the number one choice for manufacturers, integrators, and end-users seeking the very best of audio-over-IP. These include Dante Domain Manager, Dante Controller, Dante Virtual Soundcard, and Dante Via.
