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Dante vs RAVENNA

How do Dante and RAVENNA differ in practice? 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

DanteRAVENNA
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 8700TCP 8080
Transportudp, tcpudp, 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)yes
Spec availabilityproprietary-closedproprietary-documented
StewardAudinate Pty LtdALC NetworX GmbH, merged into Lawo in January 2024
First published—2010
Statuscurrentcurrent
Our confidenceverifiedreported

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.

DanteRAVENNA
Sample rates44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, 96 kHz, 176.4 kHz, 192 kHz44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, 96 kHz, 176.4 kHz, 192 kHz, 352.8 kHz, 384 kHz
Audio bit depth16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit
Audio encodingLinear PCMLinear PCM, L16 and L24, over RTP

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.

RAVENNA, audio: The high rates are the point of RAVENNA and the reason it is not interchangeable with AES67. Anything above 48 kHz, or a packet time other than 1 ms, is outside the subset an AES67-only receiver accepts.

Speaks both (2)

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

Dante only (44)

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 RAVENNA

RAVENNA is a superset of AES67. Two RAVENNA devices can agree on sample rates above 48 kHz or packet times other than 1 ms that an AES67-only receiver cannot accept, so interop needs the stream forced into the subset.
Discovery is DNS-SD, with mDNS only as the fallback where there is no DNS server. A plant running unicast DNS-SD and a device expecting mDNS will not see each other even though both are working correctly.
Connection management is RTSP plus SDP, not SAP. Many AES67 devices only listen for SAP announcements on 9875, which is why converter tools exist to translate between the two.
PTP is IEEE 1588-2008 and RAVENNA supports Default, AES67 and SMPTE ST 2059-2 profiles. Domain number and profile must match across the whole plant, and mismatches present as slow drift rather than as a clean fault.
ALC NetworX recommend static IP addressing and explicitly warn off DHCP. A DHCP lease change mid-show pulls the stream addresses out from under receivers that were told about them in an SDP.
Recommended DSCP is CS6 for PTP event messages and EF or AF41 for RTP, and RAVENNA traffic normally has to outrank VoIP on shared corporate infrastructure. On a default switch config it will not.

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 Dante or edit RAVENNA.