Dante AoIP Backbone

Sole owner — research, design, procurement, physical build, configuration, documentation

The Problem

When I joined, the acoustic research lab was under construction with a simple analog wiring plan connecting microphones and speakers across three specialized rooms. It quickly became clear that this approach wouldn't support the flexibility and scale the researchers needed — reconfiguring physical cable runs for every new experiment would be impractical and slow.

I identified Dante AV-over-IP as the right solution: a standards-based protocol that routes audio digitally over standard Ethernet, enabling any-to-any connectivity without re-cabling. But adopting it meant designing and building an entirely new network infrastructure from scratch.

Network Architecture

Three physical zones — CONFIG, SIM, and ANECHOIC — connected through a high-availability core with 100 Gbps backbone links and dedicated edge switches per zone.