Hi everyone,
Question about networking. I’d like to connect my QLX-D mics to the Mixrack so I can monitor them. Currently I have a WiFi router with not enough ports for 8 channels of mics. I have an unmanaged switch I could use for the mics and run that into the WiFi router. Am I asking for trouble with an unmanaged switch? I can configure the mics to static or DHCP within the ranges the dLive system. Thoughts?
I have this exact setup and it’s totally fine. The only time you need a managed switch is for scenarios where you want complete control over quality of service settings, like when using Dante.
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I’d get a network switch (unmanaged is fine in this case) large enough to handle all of your wireless systems (+1 additional port to connect to the other switch) and install it with those systems. You can then send a single cable from that network switch to the existing switch. This means if you have 8 channels of wireless (ie no IEM systems that also use a network connection) then you’ll need a 9 port or larger network switch.
Of course you can use a smaller switch, but then you’ll have to route multiple network cables to the original network switch. If they are all in the same location, this might be fine, but in a lot of scenarios those two switches would be located in different areas.
PS - even if you were using Dante (or something else) and needed more management/control over the network switch, simply by plugging in this “dumb” switch to a managed switch and setting everything up correctly on the managed switch, you could get all of these wireless devices put on the same VLAN. In other words, as long as all of the devices on the dumb switch will be handled/segmented the same way, you can plug it into a managed switch and be just fine. You would only need a managed switch for this secondary switch if you needed to handle/segment the different devices plugged into the secondary switch differently. Given that they are all going to be wireless devices, it is extremely unlikely that you would need to do that.
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Right on! Thanks sic and jacob. Appreciate the info.