Dante

Dante puts audio channels on the same category cable your data runs on, so a 32-channel room needs one or two network drops instead of a bundle of shielded analog pairs. Each device — microphone, DSP, amplifier, codec — becomes a subscriber on the network, and channel routing happens in software rather than by re-pulling cable. That is why Dante rooms are cheap to change later: adding two ceiling microphones is a patch and a software subscription, not a new conduit path.

The catch is that Dante is only as reliable as the switch it lives on. It needs a managed switch with QoS enabled, IGMP snooping for multicast flows, and energy-efficient Ethernet turned off — three settings that unmanaged office switches either lack or get wrong. When a Dante room 'randomly' drops audio, the fault is almost always network configuration or a clock-master conflict, not the audio hardware.