Setting Dante Gain

[Bass BoyParticipant]

Hey everyone,

Firstly, let me apologize up front for my Dante ignorance – I’m very familiar with dLive, Waves, Allen & Heath in general, etc, but this is my first ever foray into Dante. We recently purchased a couple of Avantis consoles for our student auditorium renovation. In our main auditorium, we use dLive consoles and our digital split is handled through gigaace cards. For the student auditorium, we opted to use Dante cards to handle the FOH/Monitor split.

In both auditoriums, we use Shure ULXD units for our microphones, but given that we have Dante cards to play with in the student auditorium, we (or rather our install company) decided to patch the mics through Dante instead of analog connections.

Now, when operating the console, there is no longer a gain control for those mic channels, only the trim. That much makes sense to me, as there is no longer a physical preamp to control. However, in our main auditorium for example, the preamp gain for the sockets that the mics are plugged into are usually somewhere around 30db. For these Dante connections, surely a similar amount of gain must also be required somewhere along the line, right? The install company set the gain on the Shure receivers to +12db, which certainly covers some of that gap. Our main receivers have always had their gain just living at 0.

I guess I’m basically just trying to wrap my head around Dante, and specifically the gain staging of Dante inputs. Is there some kind of “gain” setting on those channels somewhere in Dante Controller? If such a setting exists, is it just linked to the gain setting on the actual receiver? Let’s also suppose that one vocalist just sings ridiculously loud, and the channel is clipping even with the Avantis trim at 0. Would my next step be to just adjust the gain on the receiver, or is there something I should do in Dante?

I again apologize for how clueless these questions must be, and parts of them are probably even outside the scope of this forum… but any help would be greatly appreciated!

[SteffenRParticipant]

what you need a gain for? the device has an digital link to the Dante network
so everything whats happening related to any gain happens in the Shure wireless system

[Bass BoyParticipant]

Hi Steffen,

Thank you for the quick response! I guess that was kind of the heart of my question. So the gain setting on the receiver is the only gain stage now? I guess for some reason I expected the Dante card to be able to control that gain setting from the console. Maybe I’ve just got my wires crossed because of the Shure Control that the dLive series has. But really, thank you very much for your help!

[SteffenRParticipant]

So the gain setting on the receiver is the only gain stage now?

of course it’s not that simple
you have the gain on the transmitter to match the gain range for the wireless transmission, that’s analog
then you have a digital gain at the receiver, in fact this is a first trim to match the gain range of the Dante network, then you have the trim in the console

the Shure remote can control the gain/trim on the receiver

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