DANTE ON SECOND SURFACE

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This topic contains 2 replies, has 3 voices, and was last updated by Profile photo of msteel msteel 10 months, 1 week ago.

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  • #112913
    Profile photo of Boman
    Boman
    Participant

    hi
    I’m planning on having a shared mixrack with 2x surfaces. is it possible to have a network card in each surface? a waves3 at FOH and Dante at MONS?

    #112916
    Profile photo of Brian
    Brian
    Participant

    It’s my understanding that only cards inserted into the mixrack and primary surface will “show up” and be routable. A card plugged into the second surface will not be active and you won’t be able to route anything to it thereby making it useless in the multi-surface setup.

    If you haven’t read the A&H literature on multi-surface systems, it is full of good information. https://www.allen-heath.com/media/Understanding-Multi-Surface-ISS1.pdf

    #113019
    Profile photo of msteel
    msteel
    Participant

    @brian is right. Only primary surface I/O ports can be used.

    I suspect that the primary (pun intended?) reason for this is that the Mix Rack I/O port has a lower channel count than the GigaACE link itself. The Mix Rack internal GigACE port carries I/O to/from the surface including PAFL, analog and AES sockets, DX, and I/O ports. On an S class surface there can be two I/O ports and the total channel count is advertised as more than 300. On a secondary surface the GigACE link is limited to the capacity of the I/O port and so it is not possible to support all the surface I/O.

    In reality the channel count is high enough that up to 84 channels on a secondary surface I/O port could work. The mapping between GigaACE port and surface I/O is at least partially published, and it is my suspicion that the surface is “dumb” in this regard and just passes the audio data to and from the GigaACE link without caring whether it is primary and secondary. But the firmware does not support patching it.

    I do wonder what would happen if I made a show file without a secondary surface and routed stuff to the I/O port, say channel 49. If I then connected a secondary surface would that audio end up going to Port4 channel 1? I wouldn’t want to work that way but…

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