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AES50 vs Dante

Why can I not plug AES50 into a network switch? Below is every field we hold on both, side by side. Each one is sourced on the individual entry, and anything nobody could source is left blank rather than guessed.

Side by side

AES50Dante
Categoryaudio-transportaudio-transport
FlowMedia — large, continuous, on time and in orderMedia — large, continuous, on time and in order
PortsUDP 4321, UDP 4440, UDP 4444, UDP 4455, UDP 8700
Transportethernet-l2udp, tcp
Multicast239.255.0.0/16 (Dante audio and video flows), 239.69.0.0/16 (AES67 flows from Dante devices), 224.0.0.230-233 (control and monitoring)
Spec availabilityopen-free-registrationproprietary-closed
StewardAudio Engineering Society (AES)Audinate Pty Ltd
Statuscurrentcurrent
Our confidenceverifiedverified

Both are media flows. Anything that starves the link — usually a management transfer nobody scheduled — and jitter that outruns the receive buffer. That applies equally to either, so it is not a discriminator here.

What each one carries

Capability defined by the specification, not by any one product. A blank means the specification does not fix it, which is itself the answer on a transport like SRT.

AES50Dante
Sample rates48 kHz, 96 kHz44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, 96 kHz, 176.4 kHz, 192 kHz
Audio bit depth24-bit16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit
Audio channelsup to 48—
Audio encodingLinear PCM over Cat5, layer 1 rather than EthernetLinear PCM

AES50, audio: 48 channels each direction per link at 48 kHz, dropping to 24 at 96 kHz. The count is per link and bidirectional, which is why a console and a stagebox need one cable rather than two.

Dante, audio: Channel count is a property of the device rather than of the protocol. Higher sample rates halve or quarter the channels a given device carries, which is the trade people meet when they switch a rig to 96 kHz.

Speaks both (6)

These are the safe choices if you have not committed to either, or need to bridge the two.

Dante only (40)

What goes wrong with AES50

Runs over Cat5/Cat5e cable and RJ45s but is not standard routable Ethernet - AES50 ports cannot simply be plugged into a network switch.
Point-to-point by design; star/hub topologies require dedicated AES50 routers rather than off-the-shelf Ethernet switches.
Channel count trades off against sample rate: up to 48 channels at 48kHz drops to 24 channels at 96kHz per link.

What goes wrong with Dante

Dante's own clock is PTP version 1 (IEEE 1588-2002). AES67 and ST 2110 use PTPv2. Putting a Dante device into AES67 mode moves it to a different clock domain, and the two do not share a grandmaster without a bridging device.
Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az, sold as "green ethernet") must be disabled on every port carrying Dante. Audinate names it as a cause of clock instability and occasional dropouts, and it is on by default on cheap switches.
QoS has to be strict priority queueing, not weighted. Audinate's scheme is DSCP CS7 for PTP event messages, EF for audio and PTPv2, CS1 for reserved. A switch doing weighted fair queueing will still drop audio under load.
Discovery is mDNS on 224.0.0.251, which is link-local and does not cross a router. Devices on a different subnet will not appear in Dante Controller unless you are running Dante Domain Manager.
Multicast flows need one IGMP querier elected per VLAN. Two queriers, or none, and the flows either flood every port or vanish after the group membership times out.
There is no published wire specification. Anything that speaks Dante does so with a licensed Audinate module, chip or software stack, so "we will just write a driver" is not an option on this one.

Sources

Disagree with any of this?

Every claim above comes from one of the two entries and carries a source. If one is wrong, correcting it is a single file and it fixes this page automatically. Edit AES50 or edit Dante.