It's not news that the AX32 offers a truly professional combination of A/D and D/A conversion, interfacing options for analogue and digital equipment, routing flexibilty, monitor control and since the introduction of the SPQ card, speaker correction.

DAD have announced a new Dante expansion card to augment the 64 channels of Dante and AES67 the AX32 has as standard. Each expansion card brings an extra 128 channels and as there are 8 expansion slots in an AX32 chassis, a fully-loaded AX32 could accommodate 1088 channels of Dante or AES67 at 48kHz

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-card 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 rates or in live applications where there Dante networks have to be kept physically separated when operating on different clocks.

The Dante expansion card will be priced at €1,280 and is scheduled to ship November 2018. DAD will be showing this new product at IBC in Amsterdam, September 14-18 - (B52) in Hall 8