Switches for Dante, any opinions?

So I have the money to finally upgrade my audio system in my theatre. Settling on a CL 5 with a Rio or two and some other needs I find myself in need of some network switches. As much as I am getting info from my IT department and the audio vendor, I figured I would ask the collective wisdom here if any of you have any suggested products. I would also love to hear of anything to stay away from. Looking for quiet, no fan, rackmount units. Extra points for fiber and Ethercon ports. I know Yamaha has switches that check most of those boxes but they are expensive.

Thanks,

John

Don't bother with the Yamaha switches. They are overpriced for what they are. If you read through the firmware release notes, you'll also discover that Yamaha really had no idea what they were doing when they began shipping those products.

I recommend the Cisco SG300 series. These are the dominant switch out there for Dante. Yamaha has walkthroughs on their site for configuring them. Audinate tries to remain as Switzerland on the matter but if you call them and ask what they recommend, they'll tell you what they have on their own desks are SG300's. If you ever have a problem with them, just about anyone out there will be familiar with the switch model and the relevant settings.

Ethercon is great, but it's up to you to decide if you want to pay more for it. It's less important that you have Ethercon and more important that your cables are tactical-grade so they can withstand foot traffic and the new guy trying to coil them. Usually when Ethercon is required, I park an SG300 and a UPS in a portable rack and put a custom rack panel on it with feed-through RJ45's. This particular panel is designed for an SG300-10 with a VLAN for primary, a VLAN for secondary, and a generic WAP for access to the DSP, control system, and StageMix app over WiFi. They can use either category cable or fiber to tie the rack into their house infrastructure.

MNicolai said:

Don't bother with the Yamaha switches. They are overpriced for what they are. If you read through the firmware release notes, you'll also discover that Yamaha really had no idea what they were doing when they began shipping those products.

I recommend the Cisco SG300 series. These are the dominant switch out there for Dante. Yamaha has walkthroughs on their site for configuring them. Audinate tries to remain as Switzerland on the matter but if you call them and ask what they recommend, they'll tell you what they have on their own desks are SG300's. If you ever have a problem with them, just about anyone out there will be familiar with the switch model and the relevant settings.

Click to expand...

This is the truest advice on both counts -- the Yamaha switches are overpriced, and the SG300 is the Go-To switch for Dante. I used to be able to recommend Netgear GS104's and GS108's, but in recent firmware revisions they added in EEE after not having it for years, which is a huge bummer. I now have a handful of SG300-10's in all my systems, usually 2 backstage, 2 at FOH and now the GS108's are relegated to just data transfer on my networks.

Suggestion from manufacturer here. Our Via switches have a Dante QoS On/Off option that makes is VERY simple to set up. Entertainment switches built by (and supported by) entertainment people.

Rob said:

Suggestion from manufacturer here. Our Via switches have a Dante QoS On/Off option that makes is VERY simple to set up. Entertainment switches built by (and supported by) entertainment people.

Click to expand...

At $1800-$3300/ea, the per-port cost is just way too high for the average user to justify.

Going off the beaten path here presents an additional problem because it puts a user in a position where if they need 28-port or 52-port switches to distribute the network around the room, in addition to the 5- or 10-port portable switches in stage racks, they're now stuck using Manufacturer A's purpose-built Ethercon switches in the portable racks and Manufacturer B's general market switch for their house network. In my experience crossing between multiple manufacturers in the same mission-critical network is a recipe for headache.

Ease of troubleshooting is also why if I need to spec Ethercon switches for Dante I'll use the DGLink switches. They just buy the SG300 PCB's from Cisco and drop them into a custom chassis with Ethercons on it. That way you can do tie portable racks in with the house network while maintaining all-Cisco-all-the-time. The per-port cost is still high, but there won't be any surprises when it comes time to fire up the PA.

Not to also jump on the bandwagon, because I have looked at the Via switches, but even the large Broadway rigs using Dante are still for the most part on a combination of SG300's and older GS108's without EEE.

If I am dropping $1K+ on a switch, it's because I'm doing something nuts and need a solid enterprise grade managed switch that gives me all the options.

If a large show is touring or a rig is running 24/7 365 I can see the need for a more robust option, but even on the most critical sit-downs we are using consumer and prosumer switches and they are working just fine. Even then, on a touring rig I'm going to really consider spec'ing a generic switch just like I spec generic Mac Mini's - when things go wrong I can get them in any town that has a Best Buy.

I'm sure the products are great, and I'm sure they have their uses, they just aren't for me...

I would also recommend the SG300s. I did my entire system with spares and cable for less than what one of the VIA or Yamaha switches cost. It just didn't make sense to get anything else for our install. I just installed a CL5, CL1, 2 Rios, a bunch of Tios, and some virtual sound card computers etc in my system. They were super easy to configure. I created my own Ethercon patchbays for our high use ports on stage but used standard panels for the rest. They are cheap enough that you can configure a few and leave them in your rack as a spare. I bought two extras and they are ready to go.

I like the SG300-20 for smaller installations if you do not need POE. They are fanless, rackmount, have a standard sized IEC (no brick), have 4 link ports (2 are both mini-GBIC ports and RJ45), and are big enough for a couple of Vlans if you need it. I have my amp control network on the same switches as my Dante network. I have left most of them on 24/7 for over a year now without a single issue.

Please reach out if you have any questions.

FWIW, Clair Global uses the SG300 series switches in their "Stack Racks" that contain 4 ea Lab Gruppen PLM series amplifiers.

When I did the upgrade to Dante, I purchased 2 Cisco Catalyst 2960X, only because that was the exact same switch that our IT dept was using district wide. I figured if one of mine failed or I had an issue, I could then call our IT and they would know about it. Low and behold, a year after I got them, they moved onto a different switch all together. I tried to have them leave a few here for me, but they didn't.
But, I have had zero issues with these switches since install.

Been using SG300 since 2010, and later for Dante as well.
Of 20+ switches I have had one failing, out of the 16+ running 24/7/365

Just a note to this thread that the SG300 are all EoL now.

The newer SG350 SG550 series switches are all twice the performance and lots of nice firmware and feature upgrades (e.g. Layer2 or Layer3 per port, not per switch)

the 350x and 550x versions are stackable also, albeit at loss of 2 pors for redundancy (usually 10GB ports if present)

Not sure if this is the same with vanilla SG350's, but my PoE SG350-28 has an obnoxiously loud fan in it. Take that into consideration before you park one of these at your FOH mix position right around your audience members.