Application Notes: Dante in Corporate AV Installations
Boardrooms, conference rooms, campuses, lobbies — real-world deployment scenarios Corporate AV is among the most practical deployment target for…
Dante/AES67-Native AV Matrix Infrastructure
Eliminating the AV/IT Audio Divide with Flex Matrix Pro
Executive Summary
In most enterprise AV installations, audio is a second-class citizen. Video routing is handled by the matrix switcher. Audio routing is handled by a separate DSP, separate audio matrix, or analog cables no one fully documents. The result is two routing planes, two control interfaces, two firmware cycles, and two failure modes — all to distribute a single AV signal.
The KanexPro Flex Matrix Pro eliminates this division. Every I/O card — HDMI, DisplayPort, HDBaseT, Fiber, and 12G-SDI — ships with native Dante/AES67 audio networking built in at the card level. This white paper explains why that matters and how to design a Flex Matrix Pro installation that fully leverages it.
1. The Problem: Parallel AV Infrastructure
Traditional enterprise AV separates video and audio at the architectural level, creating four persistent operational problems:
- Routing sync failures: Video routes to Display B while audio still points to Display A — one of the most common AV support calls in corporate environments.
- Dante bridging cost: Adding Dante to a non-native matrix requires external AVIO hardware at every audio I/O point.
- Control fragmentation: The video matrix, DSP, and audio matrix each have separate control APIs.
- Double maintenance scope: Two independent systems to monitor, update, and troubleshoot.
Dante/AES67-native matrix switching addresses all four problems at the architectural level — not through workarounds, but by eliminating the separation between video and audio routing infrastructure.
2. Card-Level Dante: Why It Matters
In the Flex Matrix Pro, Dante/AES67 is implemented at the I/O card level — not chassis level. A chassis-level implementation provides a fixed number of Dante channels that don’t scale with I/O expansion. A card-level implementation scales Dante channel count directly with installed cards. Each card provides a dedicated Dante/AES67 network port, appears as an independent Dante device in Dante Controller, supports AES67, and is DDM compatible. A FLEX-PRO32X32 at full population appears as 16 independent Dante devices on the network.
3. Five Signal Formats with Native Dante
| Format | Cards | Dante Note |
|---|---|---|
| HDMI 2.0 | FLEX-PROHDMI-IN / OUT | HDMI embedded audio extracted at card — no breakout hardware |
| DisplayPort 1.2 | FLEX-PRODP-IN / OUT | Critical for UC endpoints where DP dominates workstation connections |
| HDBaseT/CAT | FLEX-PROCAT-IN / OUT | 330ft over CAT6A. PoC on output powers TX units. Dante independent at card. |
| Fiber Optic | FLEX-PROFIB-IN / OUT | SM to 2km / MM to 300m. Dante extracted regardless of transmission distance. |
| 12G-SDI | FLEX-PROSDI-IN / OUT | SDI embedded audio extracted at card — eliminates SDI de-embedder hardware |
4. Chassis Sizing
| Chassis | Max I/O | Max Cards | Max Dante Devices |
|---|---|---|---|
| FLEX-PRO16X16 | 16×16 | 8 | 8 |
| FLEX-PRO32X32 | 32×32 | 16 | 16 |
| FLEX-PRO64X64 | 64×64 | 32 | 32 |
| FLEX-PRO128X128 | 128×128 | 64 | 64 |
5. AES67 Interoperability
Flex Matrix Pro’s AES67 compliance enables direct audio exchange with Shure, Sennheiser, and Audio-Technica wireless systems; QSC, Biamp, and BSS DSPs; Yamaha and Allen & Heath consoles; and any AES67-compliant device — without analog or AES3 bridging hardware.
Continued in Part 2: System Design, Control Integration & Deployment Scenarios
