When you consider that now all the AV installs on the university campus I work for is all network, that’s the way... audio, video, control data, all over the same network. Biggest headache is everyone assumes you have a network dedicated to their product. We don’t.
I’ve been tempted to sell my Dante cars and get one of the rme usb offerings for just the reason you talk about Richard but the channel count is too low.
Do you mean get a RME USB-Dante card? That allows for 64x64 I/O. That seems like quite a lot for most applications I would think. Or did you just mean analog I/O?
Frankly, if money was not object I would just go buy what I've been saying is the best choice (fully available and working right now) for years and that is an RME MADI based solution. Solid gear, you know it's going to work and you can ramp up to hundreds of I/O even with USB 3 and the right ports on your computer. But for me that falls into the "if you have to ask how much this costs" category.
With regards to dedicated networks for most users I don't think it's really that large of an issue. For most of the systems I design for clients I just put in at least 2 switches sometimes 3 or 4, with one of those usually being a spare. Make one of them your Dante (or whatever) switch and then you don't need to worry about it. Even Audinate recommends this and says if you go about it that way you really can just plug and play for the most part.
I've designed systems for several universities. This questions about campus networks always comes up and frankly once I explain what it's for and that we really don't want these switches sitting on the campus network most network admins are very happy to not have to deal with it. For those that have insisted that they will need to set it up and maintain it I simply ask... "OK, so it's 630PM on a sat evening and there is an 8PM show and something is wrong.. are you or one of your staff going to be available all weekend just to be safe and make sure this little network is working correctly. Because as soon as something goes wrong the theatre department will be calling you and do you want your team responsible for the show happening that night?" When you phrase it like that and give them real work issues, most seem very happy to let you go on and set up your own dedicated networks and in some cases make a trip thorough one of their CAT or Fiber patchbays even. I've only had one network admin type that insisted they be in charge of the switch and that we use the campus standard switch and he seemed eager to be responsible for it. And in that case the faculty was happy for that solution because they were IP clueless. We'll see how that works out in the real world when the project completes. I suspect after a few heated weekend phone calls down the road the policy will change. :-)
But I get what you're dealing with. I'm sure it's more about routing various data all around campus rather than within a single facility.
The Tascam Dante converters look interesting to me even though it's roughly the same cost per I/O as the TIO. A compact amount of Line Level I/O makes a lot of sense for me.
https://tascam.com/us/product/ml-32d/tophttps://tascam.com/us/product/ml-16d/top
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