DAD AX32 Dante Expansion Card Now Shipping - Get Up To 1088 Channels Of Audio Over IP
DAD, makers of the peerless AX32 Audio Router and DA/AD converter, announced the Dante expansion card last year and these long-awaited cards are now shipping.
What Is The DAD Dante Card?
The AD/DA/DD converter and audio-routing devices by NTP Technology and Digital Audio Denmark come with support for 64 channels of Dante IP Audio right out of the box, but in an effort to meet demand for an even higher channel count, the company now introduces an optional expansion card that adds another 128 channels to the digital audio-routing matrix. Further, with eight slots available for expansion cards, users could ultimately have up to a 1,088 Dante/AES67 channels, including the 64 channels that come as standard, at 48 kHz.
The new Dante expansion card also offers sample rate conversion as well as dual redundancy network ports in order to maximise reliability, reducing the risk of losing valuable production time.
Independent Sample Rate Conversion
The new Dante expansion card introduces per-card sample rate conversion, which allows several independent audio networks that run on individual clocks and sample rates to be connected to and unified in a single Penta 720 or AX32.
This naturally unleashes a wealth of possibilities for distributing audio across sources and destinations on highly complex setups that e.g. involve sending a feed to an OB truck, while recording at a different sample rate and sending yet another feed to a FOH console or an in-ear monitoring system. Mikael Vest, Sales Director of NTP Technology told us…
“Simply adding more Dante channels may sound trivial, but once you start to think about the actual problems that this amount of channels in combination with independent sample rate conversion is capable of solving, it’s a quite significant improvement of the overall system. For instance, the new Dante card will immediately be able to solve real-world challenges when working with Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite, as well as in recording studios using e.g. the AVIOM monitoring system, but would like to record at a higher resolution.”
The internal sample rate converters on the new Dante cards have been developed in-house, Mikael...
“We started out developing converters and have never compromised on the quality of our AD/DA converters – or internal sample rate conversion within the digital domain. ‘Digital’ is part of our brand name and we take that very seriously.”