Building My Ultimate Multiroom Audio System — Part 3: Dante Audio over IP!
Building My Ultimate Multiroom Audio System — Part 3: Dante Audio over IP!
Today’s video is the third episode in my series where I build my completely over the top multiroom audio system. In this episode we’ll take a look at the Dante Audio over IP system that I’ll be using to send audio from various TVs around the house into the system. We’ll take a look at the hardware we’ll be using, take a look at how it’s configured and then finally take a look at it all up and running!
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Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
00:25 – Recap of my Plans
02:08 – AVB vs Dante
03:55 – Hardware Tour – Blustream DA22OPT
05:52 – Hardware Tour – Blustream DA22DIG
07:44 – Hardware Tour – ESI Planet 22c
08:34 – Tesira SERVER-IO Dante Support
09:09 – The Software – Dante Controller
16:40 – Dante in Action!
21:32 – Dante AES67 Mode with Linux
23:57 – Conclusion
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12:20 I recently bought a new planet 22c and saw exactly the same thing. I suspect this is a leftover from their factory testing procedure, where they setup a flow, check audio works and then put the device in the box without removing the flow 😀
I’m all for Dante and IP solutions, so this isn’t a critique of that at all, but just wanted to highlight that analogue balanced line-level audio is quite robust over very long distances. A shielded CAT5/6 cable can carry 4 channels of balanced line-level audio for many hundreds of metres without issues. Even balanced mic-level is perfectly fine over a hundred metres or so. So yes, audio over IP is amazing, but if your setup uses balanced audio gear and doesn’t need many channels, never be afraid to use (ideally shielded) CAT5/6 as an analogue multicore.
Hi Cameron, great vid and I only found it marginally difficult to understand on 0.9x… only joking 😉 Having watched your other video just now about the Tasira… I presume Dante devices can’t do one-to-many, i.e. send from one and receive to multiple? If it could, might it render the need for a centralised zone amp redundant, as you could just have an amp in each room you need the audio, and basically have every room connected together as needed? I note you do your audio routing using the Tasira, but could you equally do it by dynamically controlling the Dante devices directly, e.g. from Node-RED? For example if I wanted to switch one source from one receiver to another? I mean – that Dante software is just sending configuration packets to the Dante devices right? I wonder if that could be replicated in Node-RED. Maybe a weekend project… Or is the networking between Dante devices encrypted and with certificates and whatnot? Right now I have a couple of Monoprice Zone Amps (12 stereo zones in total) with thick heavy speaker cable running to each room. The amps themselves are the "matrix mixers" so no need for additional audio DSP, at least not for my needs. Two of the six-zone amps are connected together to make 12 zones. You can route many to many, with the limitation that you can only route 6 of the 12 inputs to any of the 12 outputs (i.e. can’t use all 12 inputs). But for me 6 inputs is just enough for 4 central sources (airplay / squeezebox etc.) plus a couple of roving source connectors which could be connected to a room over CAT6. Best bit is that I can control the amps directly from Node-RED (via RS232 to the amps) including vol/balance/bass/treble/mute/power/input channel selection for each output channel, which is cool as I have touchscreens set up around the home that allow me to control each room’s audio, or all rooms together. Paired with a rackmount 3 channel DAB radio and Airplay inputs. It’s fine but I’m always scouting for alternatives. Finally where do you get reasonable quality / cheap toslink cables of differing lengths? I need a stash of quite a few of them for my whole home audio setup 🙂 Shame about pricing for this stuff. Any old models that go on ebay?
Blustream’s Dante products are unfortunately quite unreliable, we have used, and then removed them from our commercial AV installs, and I know others in AV who’s had the same issue. I’d suggest trying to exchange them for Audinate AVIO, or maybe try Turtle brand (no experience yet, we’ve only just bought them).
That said neither do TOSLINK products, so you’d need an adapter as well.
You’re only going to be using Dante for getting audio from sources to the Tesera(?), which then pipes it into a ceiling speaker somewhere, correct? It’s not going to be outputting audio to a speaker through a receiving Dante device, so you are going to basically map every Dante device to always go to one of the Dante inputs on the Tesera, no need for them to change. Is that right?
Hmm, I wonder how much Dante gear costs….?
Oh. Nevermind. I’m sticking with Aryllic
I love Dante, I use it everyday at work and it’s rock solid.
On a 1Gb/s link you can run up to 512 in / 512 out channels at 48kHz / 24-bit uncompressed audio. With Dante Domain Manager you can even do L3 routing.
Latency is ultra-low thanks to PTPv1 clocking, but you must ensure clocking stays stable.
⚠️ A word of warning: be careful with IGMP Snooping on small switches. Dante relies on multicast for clocking and device management (even if most audio flows are unicast). If IGMP Snooping is badly implemented, it can block the multicast traffic and cause serious clocking issues.
If you don’t use multicast audio flows, it’s often safer to just disable IGMP Snooping.
For the ESI device, I had issue (cracking in the audio) when it was powered with PoE, use it with the power adapter included.
Well you inspired me. Got myself a used tesiraforte fixed DSP with Dante. Looking forward to your video about controlling it in nodered!
U play Clash?
We use Dante at the studio I work at. It’s amazing and also very resilient. The virtual sound card software is one of my favorites since we can run multiple software outputs at the same time into a board without multiple adapters and analog lines.
How is Dante on Linux doing? Want to dump windows…
Are those TOSLINK adapters really stereo only? SPDIF can carry multichannel bitstreams such as Dolby Digital AC3 and DTS (the native formats of DTV sources) so I’m surprised they don’t do surround sound.
does the planet22c have the master clock too??
Would you consider spending a little of time on what considerations you made when choosing your rack mounted audio amps on the next video? I know you touched upon that hardware when you introduced all of the equipment in Part 1, but I’m curious to hear what made you choose what you did in fact settle on, and a little on what trade offs/options are out there from your perspective.
0.75x speed is the best for me to absorb your speaking.
Huh… my TV makes you select between optical out _or_ the internal speakers.
Not even the 3.5mm out works if you turn on optical out.
This gear tickles my fancy. I blame you if i end up buying some of this gear!! 😂
Speaking so fast and then having long pauses is quite weird to listen to
It’s 0.9x speed time again 😜
Seems convoluted for a house. Just get some wireless headphones buddy! 🤣
collab by email？
Pretty cool to see AES67 working on Linux! Apparently there’s also a PipeWire Plugin that supports it!
Have you seen what Ubiquiti is cooking? Av Pro
Yeah Dante definitely seems to be the way to go for a DIY home a/v solution, it’s so flexible. It solves a lot of problems with my highly specific use case, actually have been following your channel for a while since it’s very helpful in my situation. I have a Linus Tech Tips style computer in a rack situation; run 2 machines 1 Windows and 1 Linux that I would like to mix to the same stereo output at my desk; am in to high end audiophilia, play around with dacs and amps and such but also want to run Atmos and multiroom audio using said gear. I can do all of that easily using Dante. I can easily route or sum audio from any source I want and have room correction using a Dante audio interface which I’ve made controllable in HA as well through MIDI2MQTT and a RPi. I’ve been looking to acquire an Atmos/DTS:X to Dante decoder to introduce immersive audio in to the mix, which finally seems to be shipping, however total cost of admission is still quite expensive.
In combination with a HDMI 2.1 matrix switch, I can have a seamless media experience regardless if I’m in my living room or at my desk set-up. It’s nice to have a music streamer with a display to show the album art of the song you’re playing and have physical media controls mixed in to your game audio when you want to play your own songs, or switch to the linux machine seamlessly if you’re following a walkthrough or whatever (and use your microphone both on Windows for your game and for discord running on the linux machine). Can also switch around systems or streaming devices depending on who is using what screen.
Just wish there was a way to integrate wireless audio in to this set-up. Using Wifi 7 and MLO you can achieve very low latencies so it should be possible to use an Android device as an endpoint in this way but I’m sure there’s a lot of caveats. I did find one solution actually that offers this, but can’t speak to it’s quality and seems very expensive. Another idea is to have decent Bluetooth transmitters with coax or AES3 in but the idea of having to unpair and repair devices constantly already frustrates me beforehand.
Another niche usecase is I like to DJ using vinyls and running to outputs of my mixer in to an ADC with this set-up allows me to have that audio available anywhere. I would have to digitize the signal for DSP/room correction anyway as it really helps your system sound a lot better.
Optical toslink (and therefore also SPDIF) natively uses 44,1khz, so if your setup is mainly using those on the digital side whilst the analog side can switch between 44,1khz and 48khz, I would recommend making the whole system 44,1khz so the optical units don’t need to upsample.
Pretty impressive that you can put them on a completely different network without even DHCP and they somehow still discover eachother.