At Messe 2018 our friends at RME have announced two new AOIP products - A Dante and an AVB interface.

RME have been notably absent from the proliferation of brands releasing AOIP products and in an interesting move when so much of the industry is planting its flag in the Dante world, RME have released both Dante and AVB interfaces.

Digiface Dante

This tiny USB 3 interface is a mobile alternative to high channel count Dante solutions like the PCIe-R card from Audinate or the Focusrite Rednet PCIeR. It is estimated to sell for €1200 when it becomes available.

RME's drivers are well known for their quality and reliability and the Digiface Dante uses the Madiface drivers allowing operation down to 32 samples.

In terms of I/O the Digiface Dante offers 64 bidirectional channels of Dante for a total of 128 channels and in a clever repurposing of hardware the two BNC word clock connectors can be used to provide a further 128 channels of I/O over MADI.

The unit supports RME TotalMix so custom routing and mixing can be applied. With the built in headphone out and the possibility to power either via an external power supply or vis bus power this interface packs an extraordinary amount of power into a small package. The Digiface Dante supports Windows and Mac systems.

Digiface AVB

In an interesting move, RME chose to support AVB with this tiny interface which is expected to sell for around €800 when it becomes available.

This box is only supported for Windows systems and offers similar operation to the Dante box using the Madiface driver for low latency operation, TotalMix software for routing and mixing but increased network channel count of 128 in and 128 out over AVB/TSN for a total of 256 channels of network I/O.

We look forward to trying these devices in reviews on Production Expert in the coming months.