Here’s our setup gx4816 with dx168 expansion running to our FOH console. FOH avantis has dante 128x128 card for digital split to broadcast and waves card for superrack. Broadcast avantis has dante 128x128 card and waves card for separate superrack setup. FOH console is set to internal clock, FOH dante card is set to external sync via dante controller, to pull sync from FOH console. Broadcast avantis clock source is set to port 2(dante card). Everything is running at 96khz. Dante controller has FOH dante set at preferred clock leader. There is also a MacBook pro with dante virtual sound card. Everything has been working fine for 1 year. Today the broadcast console got staticy for a second then lost audio signal. Tried rebooting broadcast avantis, didn’t change anything. Dante controller showed broadcast not synced and muted and showed FOH synced and clock leader. After the service we rebooted the FOH console and everything worked again. Is there anything that we should look at in this setup? Not sure why this happened and if there’s anything we can do to prevent this type of thing in the future.
Our church’s FoH system runs on a dLIve S7000 connected to a DM64 MixRack that contains a 128 channel Dante card. This provides audio over Dante to an SQ6 monitor desk and a couple of Mac Minis running Dante VSC.
Setting your Dante card to sync to the mixer’s internal clock sounds a little suspicious because you have not listed any other external digital devices that also need to share this clock pulse.
If you were using other non-Dante digital devices such as A/D converters or external digital effect units, then you would typically install a master clock device such as a BigBen and then configure everything to sync off that.
The Dante training course says that wherever possible, you should nominate a Dante card to act as the clock master and then every other Dante device syncs to that.
I suggest making the Dante card in your FoH desk the clock master.
Hope that helps
Chris W
Dante in its own vlan? IGMP snooping configured properly?
Any changes made?
any NDI in the environment?
(I had everything working well for months and then I started losing clock. Frequent audio dropouts. One of the culprits was a bad network cable on a computer that caused nDI to flip over to use the Dante network. They were supposed to be in separate physical networks (not just vlans) and on soearate NICs)
This is the method that A&H recommends, with one addition (that you probably have set up, but forgot to mention) - you must ensure that the FOH Dante card is set as the “Preferred Master” in Dante Controller. This forces the entire Dante network to sync with the FOH’s internal clock - assuming the FOH Dante card is operating correctly.
That being said, it sounds like the FOH Dante Card itself had a glitch/error that caused the loss of connection. Clocking issues generally don’t cause a complete loss of data. They usually results in glitchy sounding audio, but audio continues to pass. Therefore I don’t think your issue had anything to do with a clocking issue. I think the card itself had an error/problem that it couldn’t recover from and you would have lost audio regardless of how your clocking was set up.
That’s my impression of what happened based off your comments.
The Dante card in foh console is set to preferred master in Dante controller. My thinking it was a clock issue is from in Dante Controller clock status tab was showing broadcast Dante not synced and muted because of that error. It does make sense that it was a glitch from the foh dante card since rebooting that console fixed it. I wonder if rebooting the Dante card from Dante Controller would have fixed it.
Here’s the livestream from when it happened, go to 59:14 to hear it.
Found this In Dante card firmware release notes
Fixes
ID32 ID29 Clock Leader cards set to Redundant mode could occasionally present latency
issues and mute Dante audio after a period of time.