Do You Need a Managed Switch for Dante? Switches for IEM and Playback Racks

For a rack with a console card, a playback interface and a transmitter rack on Dante, you do not need a managed switch. You need a gigabit switch that never puts its ports to sleep. That rules out more cheap switches than you’d think.

The short answer

• Four to eight Dante devices, one rack: an unmanaged gigabit switch is fine, provided it has no Energy Efficient Ethernet or lets you turn it off.
• Dante sharing a network with anything else, or more than one switch in the chain, or multicast flows: a managed switch with DSCP QoS and IGMP snooping.
• Either way: gigabit, not 100 Mbit, and plugged into the rack’s power conditioner, not a wall wart behind the stage.

What Dante asks of a switch

Yamaha’s Dante design guide spells out the requirements. The switch should be gigabit and non-blocking, with every port able to run at full speed at once; the guide puts the bar at 1 Gbps per port in each direction and a forwarding rate of at least 1.4 million packets per second per port, and notes some low-cost gigabit switches miss it. Small systems can run at 100 Mbit, but gigabit is the recommendation for stability.

The one setting that matters most is Energy Efficient Ethernet, sold as Green Ethernet or IEEE 802.3az. It lets a port doze when traffic is light. Dante’s clock sync is light traffic. The guide says EEE can disrupt sync and cause dropouts, and that some switches don’t negotiate it correctly with each other. On a managed switch you turn it off. On an unmanaged one you can’t, so you need a model that doesn’t have it.

The two in the catalog

• TP-Link TL-SG108: eight gigabit ports, unmanaged, metal desktop case, about 4W. TP-Link has shipped this model in several hardware versions, and whether EEE can be disabled depends on the version, so check the one in your hand against TP-Link’s spec page before trusting it with clock.
• Netgear GS308: eight gigabit ports, unmanaged, metal case, about 4W. The same caution applies: confirm the hardware version’s EEE behaviour.

Both are desktop boxes, so they need a rack shelf or a rack-mount kit, and both run from a small DC adapter. Put the adapter on the conditioner. A switch that loses power takes every Dante stream in the rack with it.

When a managed switch earns its place

• Shared network. If lighting control, a streaming encoder or the venue’s Wi-Fi touch the same switch, you want DSCP quality of service so Dante clock packets go first. Yamaha’s guide asks for strict priority with four queues.
• Multicast. One source feeding several Dante receivers at once wants IGMP snooping so the stream reaches only the ports that asked for it.
• Separation. VLANs keep Dante on its own segment of a bigger network.
• Visibility. A managed switch shows you link speed and errors per port, which is the first thing you want when a stream drops mid-show.

Preamps

A switch has no audio in it at all, so there is nothing to count. Its rig impact is one rack space on a shelf, one outlet, and a cable to every Dante device. If Dante is new to the rack, start with AES50 to Dante and back for how the console gets on the network.

Sources

• Yamaha Dante network design guide: selecting network devices: gigabit, non-blocking, EEE, QoS, IGMP, managed vs unmanaged