Dante & Tio or DX168?

[Mark EllisParticipant]

Hey Guys! I’ve done a few different searches on the forum, but my cover band is just about to pull the trigger on a CDM32 and we’re stuck in a bit of analysis paralysis on whether we want a Dante card and 2 Yamaha Tio stage boxes, or a couple DX168s. We’ll have a computer side of stage on top of the CDM32 rack, but the bulk of the mixing night after night will be done on an iPad out front via wifi. Whichever stage boxes we get they’ll be racked, and rack space is at a premium, so the Tio boxes:

1) have a (MUCH) better form factor for us.

2) are less expensive.

3) having the Dante card gives us I/O capability to record to a DAW

4) I don’t care for the IEC power and ethernet ports on the DX168 being on the side and hard to get to in a rack.

I also think our sound man being able to control the gain on the 32 inputs on the CDM32 itself is more than sufficient; nothing else should really change after the initial setup and if they do, it’s not a huge deal for someone on stage to make the adjustment on the PC on stage. But we’re also a wee bit concerned about how well Dante is integrated into the board. I know it’s certainly not a ‘kludgy’ setup in any way, but I’d love to hear anyone’s experience with it, especially any issues, and whether or not we’re better off with the DX168 which does seem bulletproof and I know also sounds great. The setup will only be used by the same band night after night.

And here’s yet another vote for A&H to make a 16in/8out stage box that’s better designed for rack mounting…

[BrianParticipant]

You are forgetting the #1 reason to use the same manufacturer for both console and Dante stage boxes – if you use a different manufacturer’s Dante box with your console, you will not have control of any of the preamp settings from within the console. You’ll have to use a separate computer running a software program from the stage box manufacturer to access and adjust the preamp settings. These settings include preamp gain, phantom power, polarity, etc. Whether or not this is going to be an annoying limitation depends on the person using it. Personally I would find it pretty annoying and would much prefer to use a Dante stage box that was manufactured by the same company as my console to ensure that these preamp settings would be available in the console.

This isn’t an A&H issue either. For example, if you used Digico Dante stage boxes with a Yamaha console, you wouldn’t have these preamp controls available in the Yamaha console either. This is because Dante does not provide any standard protocol for these “control settings” – only the actual audio. Therefore every manufacturer has created a different “control protocol” and none of them are compatible with each other.

[Mark EllisParticipant]

Thanks for the reply, Brian. I agree fully with your point I obviously didn’t do a good job of explaining that in my post when I said, “I also think our sound man being able to control the gain on the 32 inputs on the CDM32 itself is more than sufficient; nothing else should really change after the initial setup and if they do, it’s not a huge deal for someone on stage to make the adjustment on the PC on stage.”

[Mark EllisParticipant]

Anyone have any experience with the DX168 vs Dante?

[BrianParticipant]

The DX168 stage boxes work great. They are “direct connection” style boxes which means the box gets plugged directly into the console. The only way they would fail to connect is if there was a problem with the network cable, or a hardware failure of some sort. In other words, there is a lot less complexity to them than a Dante stage box is going to have. Furthermore, as long as you have a Dante card installed in the system somewhere, the DX/GX I/O can be routed to any other Dante equipment. The main difference is that you will be routing through the console instead of directly from the stage box. This means the console must be powered on for the I/O to be accessible on the Dante network.

Personally I would always prefer to use DX/GX stage boxes vs Dante. As already noted, Dante is more complex and has more failure points than the A&H proprietary stage boxes. The proprietary boxes also have less latency, but Dante isn’t so latent that it is going to be a noticeable difference. Still, the proprietary boxes are faster and more reliable (due to their less complex nature) than Dante IMHO. The main reason to use Dante is if you have a large number of inputs because there are limits to the number of DX connections you can have. You can use DX hubs or cards to increase the number of connected DX boxes, but there is still a limit to what a system can support. With Dante, it’s arguably easier to get into the really high channel counts. Still, I would tend to want to use DX/GX boxes until I hit that practical limit, and then add more Dante I/O if needed.

[Mark EllisParticipant]

Thanks for all your help, Brian. I think you’re right, and we’ll go with the DX168s.

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