4.0 Surround System using Dante for performance

[h3rtz]

Hi there,

first poster here, and I am actually not a tech guy but a performing artist so pls bear with me even if I ask dumb questions

I have a performance coming up in a very special location, a mid 18th century temple in Beijing with an audio system unlike anything I've seen before. It basically consists of 4 stands carrying 2 vertically stacked Devialet Phantom I speakers each and arranged in a concentric circle layout (or square if you will, with each speaker tower standing at a corner and pointing to the center).

It’s a Dante network and each speaker is visible as an entity in Dante Controller. I unfortunately can’t tell which Dante hardware they’re running bcs everything is packed into generic 19” rack rases. I could find out though if that was of crucial importance.

Now looking at this arrangement as an artist I immediately thought this should be a surround system but turns out they’ve only used it in stereo so far. But I would really like to turn this into a surround system for my performance and I am sure it’s possible so I did my research and this is how far I got:

- figured out that there’s a surround panning device for my DAW (Ableton Live) that send out 4 channels (or more) of audio and installed it
- installed Dante Virtual Sound Card on my laptop and chose it as a 4x4 channel audio interface in my DAW
- connected to the Dante network of the venue with my laptop; my four channels do show up on the hosts Dante Controller routing page
- figured out which speaker is which in Dante Controller

I’m pretty sure that all I have to do now is connecting each one of my channels with one of the speaker towers (top and bottom speaker on the same channel). BUT I can only make 2 connections max no matter where I put them. Additional connections show up as a “prohibited” icon in Dante Controller. When I hover over the icon with the mouse pointer I get the message:

“Subscription status: no more flows (TX)
transmitter cannot support any more flows
Reduce fan out by unsubscribing receivers or switching to multicast”

I’ve read up on Unicast and Multicast flow modes but I didn’t figure out how or even where to set it up. So I am basically stuck here.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Cheers, Tim

[PacketCollision]

You should be able to see the number of flows used/available for the various Dante devices by using Dante Controller. From the Device View page go to the View menu and choose "View Flow Information". Switching to multicast flows in your case won't help, because you're transmitting a different signal to each receiver, but maybe that will give you some info on where the bottleneck is. Are you on Gigabit? I know 100mbit can get overloaded with a relatively small number of flows.

[h3rtz]

You should be able to see the number of flows used/available for the various Dante devices by using Dante Controller. From the Device View page go to the View menu and choose "View Flow Information". Switching to multicast flows in your case won't help, because you're transmitting a different signal to each receiver, but maybe that will give you some info on where the bottleneck is. Are you on Gigabit? I know 100mbit can get overloaded with a relatively small number of flows.

Thanks for your input! TBH I don’t know what’s the capacity of the system, I’ll be there tmr and try to figure that out. So let’s say bandwidth is the issue, how would I fix it?

EDIT: I was just told they have a Gigabit PoE switch.

EDIT 2: would there be a way to reduce flows by grouping receivers that get the same signal? I guess it would be more efficient to send 4 different channels to 4x2 speakers than 8x1?

[GaryH]

If you can take some pics of your DC pages, especially Device info for each Dante device in your system. It seems like that few multicast flows should be not be that big of a problem for a switch. What switch do you use? I would guess your DAW and DVS might be the problem.

[h3rtz]

Creating Mulicast flows sloved the issue. I now so have full control over the 4x2 speakers. Awesome!

Thanks for your input Gentlemen.