The AD/DA/DD converter and audio-routing devices needed to enhance DAD’s AX32 and NTP Technology’s Penta 720 is now available for use.
The Dante/AES67 expansion card first gained exposure at IBC2018 in Amsterdam in September. Now, the devices are being shipped from Denmark across the globe. They come with support for 64 channels of Dante IP Audio. But, in an effort to meet demand for a higher channel count, the company is introducing an optional expansion card that adds an additional 128 channels to the digital audio-routing matrix.
Further, with eight slots available for expansion cards, users could use up to 1,088 Dante/AES67 channels, including the 64 channels that comes as standard, at 48 kHz.
The new Dante expansion card also offers sample rate conversion as well as dual redundancy network ports. The company says this will maximize reliability, reducing the risk of losing production time.
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, for example, 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,” the company says.
The internal sample rate converters on the new Dante cards were developed in-house.
“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,” says Mikael Vest, Sales Director of NTP Technology. “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.”
