Building on its native support for 64 channels of Dante IP audio, NTP has introduced an optional expansion card that adds a further 128 channels to the DAD AD/DA/DD digital audio routing matrix. Now, with eight slots available for expansion cards, end-users have up to 1,088 Dante/AES67 channels (including the 64 channels that come as standard) at 48kHz.
The new Dante expansion card also offers sample-rate conversion on all channels, as well as dual redundancy network ports in order to maximise reliability. Per-channel sample rate conversion using more cards allows several independent audio networks that run on individual clocks and sample rates to be connected to and unified in a single DAD AX32 or Penta 720 unit.
This brings extended 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 IEM systems.
‘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 DAD’s mother company NTP Technology. ‘For instance, the new Dante card will immediately be able to solve real-world challenges in regard to high channel counts when working with Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite, as well as in recording studios where Dante based monitoring systems are used, but there is a need to record at a different sample rate or in Live applications where there Dante networks have to be kept physically separated when operating on different clocks.’
The internal sample rate converters on the new Dante cards have been developed by NTP Technology/DAD. ‘We started out developing converters and have never compromised on the quality of our AD/DA converters – or internal sample rate conversion within the digital domain. “Digital” is part of our brand name and we take that very seriously,’ Vest adds.
More: www.digitalaudio.dk
