Dante vs AES67

Q: Dante vs AES67: Can Dante and AES67 talk to each other?

Dante: Audinate's proprietary audio-over-IP system carrying uncompressed multichannel audio, clocking and device control over ordinary gigabit ethernet. It is the default audio network on most touring and install jobs, and usually what a desk, a stagebox and an amp rack are talking to each other with. AES67: An AES interoperability standard for streaming uncompressed audio over IP using RTP and IEEE 1588 PTP. It is the common ground that lets Dante, RAVENNA, Q-LAN, Livewire and Ravenna-derived broadcast gear exchange streams without a hardware bridge.

showstack / compare / dante-vs-aes67

Can Dante and AES67 talk to each other? 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

	Dante	AES67
Category	audio-transport	audio-transport
Flow	Media — large, continuous, on time and in order	Media — large, continuous, on time and in order
Ports	UDP 4321, UDP 4440, UDP 4444, UDP 4455, UDP 8700	UDP 5004, UDP 9875
Transport	udp, tcp	udp
Multicast	239.255.0.0/16 (Dante audio and video flows), 239.69.0.0/16 (AES67 flows from Dante devices), 224.0.0.230-233 (control and monitoring)	yes
Spec availability	proprietary-closed	published-paid
Steward	Audinate Pty Ltd	Audio Engineering Society (AES)
First published	—	2013
Status	current	current
Our confidence	verified	reported

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.

	Dante	AES67
Sample rates	44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, 96 kHz, 176.4 kHz, 192 kHz	48 kHz
Audio bit depth	16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit	16-bit, 24-bit
Audio encoding	Linear PCM	Linear PCM, L16 and L24

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.

AES67, audio: 48 kHz is the mandatory interoperability point; other rates may be supported but cannot be assumed between vendors. The same applies to packet time, where 1 ms is required and 125 microseconds is optional.

Speaks both (31)

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

Dante Controller Audinate
Dante Virtual Soundcard Audinate
Q-SYS Designer QSC, LLC
Avid VENUE S6L-32D Avid
Biamp TesiraFORTÉ Biamp
BSS Soundweb London BLU-806 BSS Audio
Cisco Catalyst 9200 Series Cisco
Clear-Com FreeSpeak II Clear-Com
d&b audiotechnik 40D installation amplifier d&b audiotechnik
d&b audiotechnik DS100 Signal Engine d&b audiotechnik
DiGiCo Quantum 338 DiGiCo
DirectOut PRODIGY.MP DirectOut
Ferrofish A32 Dante Ferrofish
Focusrite RedNet A16R MkII Focusrite
Green-GO Digital Intercom Green-GO (ELC)
L-Acoustics LA4X L-Acoustics
Lab.gruppen PLM 20K44 Lab.gruppen
Lab.gruppen Lake LM44 Lab.gruppen
Luminex GigaCore 10 Luminex Network Intelligence
Luminex GigaCore 16Xt Luminex Network Intelligence
Luminex GigaCore 26i Luminex Network Intelligence
NETGEAR M4250 (AV Line) NETGEAR
Powersoft X8 Powersoft
Q-SYS Core 510i QSC (Q-SYS)
Riedel Bolero Riedel Communications
RTS ADAM Intercom Matrix RTS (Bosch)
Symetrix Radius NX 12x8 Symetrix
Yamaha CL5 Yamaha
Yamaha DM7 Yamaha
Yamaha Rio3224-D2 Yamaha
Yamaha RIVAGE PM7 Yamaha

Dante only (15)

Ardour Ardour Community
Dante Domain Manager Audinate
Pro Tools Avid
Smaart Rational Acoustics
WATCHOUT Dataton
Waves SoundGrid Studio Waves Audio
Allen & Heath Avantis Allen & Heath
Allen & Heath dLive S7000 Allen & Heath
Allen & Heath SQ-6 Allen & Heath
Behringer X32 Behringer
Cisco Catalyst 9300 Cisco
DiGiCo SD12 DiGiCo
Midas HD96-24 Midas
RME Digiface Dante RME
SSL Live L550 Solid State Logic

AES67 only (2)

L-Acoustics LA7.16i L-Acoustics
L-Acoustics P1 L-Acoustics

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.

What goes wrong with AES67

AES67 mandates no discovery method at all. SAP, Bonjour/mDNS and NMOS IS-04 are all in the field. Two fully compliant devices can sit on the same switch and never see each other, and you patch by hand from the SDP.

It standardises the stream and the clock, not the ecosystem. There is no AES67 device control, no level control, no naming, no subscription model, so day to day patching still happens in each vendor's own tool.

AES67 is built on PTPv2 (IEEE 1588-2008). Dante's native clock is PTPv1, so a Dante device switched into AES67 mode changes clock domain and stops clocking with its non-AES67 neighbours.

A 1 ms packet time is the only one every AES67 device must support. 125 us, 250 us, 333.33 us and 4 ms are optional, and broadcast gear often defaults to a short one for latency. A receiver that only does 1 ms just refuses the stream.

An AES67 flow carries no channel names. Channel order in the stream is the only thing that identifies what is where, so document the map or you will be counting pairs at soundcheck.

Sources

Which network ports does Dante use? — Audinate primary
Dante Information for Network Administrators v7.1 — Audinate primary
Dante product and platform overview — Audinate primary
AES Standards Store (AES67-2023 listing and pricing) — Audio Engineering Society primary
AES67-2013, Networks, audio-over-IP interoperability (publication announcement) — AES Standards Committee primary
AES67 FAQ — AIMS Alliance
RAVENNA and AES67 white paper (mandatory 1 ms packet time, optional packet times, L16/L24) — ALC NetworX

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 Dante or edit AES67.