FRANKFURT – Hartman+Mathais Partnership incorporated Dante technology into Goethe University's Frankfurt Campus. The installation project involved the Westend and Riedberg campuses, and the Riedberg campus was the first project in Germany to use Audinate's Dante solution as the audio network.
For its efforts, Hartman+Mathais received the Sinus – Systems Integration Award at Prolight+Sound, which recognizes planning, creativity and the implementation of plans solving complex problems.
"We decided to use Dante because we didn't want to face the restrictions associated with other digital networking solutions," said Detlef Hartmann, a partner in the firm, who credited Dante as "a self-configuring system" that eliminates the need to "assign an individual IP-address to every component involved. Latency in Dante is very small," Hartmann added, "and many channels can easily be transmitted between different buildings and different campus with no problems. It truly is plug and play."
In the system designed for the Riedberg campus, Dante networking is enabled in all the Peavey MediaMatrix NION n6 and NION n3 units through a special NIO-8 ml II audio card. To handle a large number of channels, multiple NION-units are coupled together via Peavey's proprietary MediaMatrix X-DAB-Bus (up to 512 channels). To meet the requirements of the central infrastructure center at Riedberg, 96 audio channels are used.
QFlex manufacturer Tannoy provided a version of its steerable loudspeaker columns with Dante interfaces. This allows loudspeakers in the lecture halls and in selected classrooms to be connected to the system directly.
"We are able to do Layer 3 routing easily and efficiently, which we couldn't do with other networking technologies," noted partner Stefan Mathias. "Dante's compatibility with AVB standards promises a secure investment for the University's future, which is one of the main reasons we decided to go with Dante."
"We are delighted to have been a part of this prestigious implementation and award," said John McMahon, VP of worldwide sales and support for Audinate.
For more information, please visit www.audinate.com and www.hmpartner.de.
