AX32 has become widely recognized as a Swiss Army Knife for converting and routing between audio formats. Now, we sharpen that knife once again by adding massive Dante/AES67 IP Audio bandwidth.

AX32 already comes with support for 64 channels of Dante IP Audio right out of the box, but in an effort to meet demand for an even higher channel count, we now introduce an optional expansion card that adds another 128 channels to your digital audio-routing matrix.

Further, with eight slots available for expansion cards, you could ultimately have up to 1,088 Dante/AES67 channels, including the 64 channels that comes as standard, at 48 kHz.

The new Dante expansion card also offers sample rate conversion on all channels as well as dual redundancy network ports in order to maximize reliability, reducing the risk of losing valuable production time.

Independent Sample Rate Conversion  

The new Dante expansion card introduces per-channel sample rate conversion, which by using more cards allows several independent audio networks that run on individual clocks and sample rates to be connected to and unified in a single AX32 unit.

This naturally unleashes a wealth of possibilities for distributing audio across sources and destinations on highly complex setups that e.g. involve sending a feed to an OB truck, while recording at a different sample rate and sending yet another feed to a FOH console or an in-ear monitoring system.

Simply adding more Dante channels may sound trivial, but once you start to think about the actual problems that this amount of channels in combination with independent sample rate conversion is capable of solving, it’s a quite significant improvement of the overall system.

For instance, the new Dante card will immediately be able to solve real-world challenges in regard to high channel counts when working with Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite, as well as in recording studios where Dante based monitoring systems are used, but there is a need to record at a different sample rate or in Live applications where there Dante networks have to be kept physically separated when operating on different clocks.

The internal sample rate converters on the new Dante cards have been developed in-house and we have never compromised on the quality of our AD/DA converters – or internal sample rate conversion within the digital domain. ‘Digital’ is simply part of our brand name and we take that very seriously!