I've been looking at both systems for my next upgrade. The Rednet Dante stuff looks pretty cool but it's gawd awful expensive, SSL has a 16 Ch madi interface combo for less than 2K.
Does anyone know how the two compare as far as audio quality, latency, etc?
 

I don't have an answer for you but I appreciate your having made the post as it led me to Sweetwater's "Misc converter" listing which I was not aware of.
 
That SSL package looks pretty nice. I especially like the 16 in 4 out format as that's plenty for the way I use my DAW.
 
Can you daisy chain the SSL boxes to one MADI card?

Yes, according to the manual on the SSL site.

Thanks Tom!

Audio quality wise they should be precisely the same. All lossless digital. Latency... man I have looked and looked to try and get a technical answer but I can't. The lack of proper engineering data on audio stuff drives me up the wall some times.
 
So all I can tell you is from what I know about the underlying technologies:
 
MADI is based on FDDI and CDDI. These were 100mbps synchronous ring networks used a decade or more ago in computer networks. Because of the synchronous nature of operation, it makes some logical sense for audio data. It doesn't look like there is much overhead on the signal, so there shouldn't be a lot of latency. While FDDI itself was fairly high latency, that was because of the ring nature, data passed through all connected hosts. MADI is point-to-point which will keep latency down.
 
Dante is gigabit Ethernet. That is a very low latency interconnect. With a good adapter you can see times of 100 microseconds, and that is with the overhead of the TCP/IP stack. For pure Ethernet frames, as one would assume Dante is using, it is lower. However this depends on packet size, this is for small packets, and also assume no retransmissions. Plus Dante is switched, just like regular Ethernet, and switching fabrics add latency. That said, it should still be very low. As an example if I ping the webserver here at work with a 1500 byte packet I have a latency of about 1.4ms. That is the time it takes for the data to get through my TCP stack, to my NIC, out through 3 copper gig switches, over 10gig fibre to the layer 3 access switches, to the core switches, to a different access switch, back to copper, in to the web server, up its stack, and then all that back around again. Moving to something close on the network and in this building, the time drops down to below 1ms. This is on a standard, public, shared, network.
 
So, it would mostly come down to implementation on the soundcard. The interconnect technology itself shouldn't have a substantial impact.
 
How are they in practice? Wish I could tell you. I haven't been able to find anything on that.

Dante is a bugger to set up correctly

Thanks Scott.

Round-trip latency with Dante is also a bit higher than other solutions.
I believe it's ~10ms at the lowest (effective) buffer settings.
 
I was thinking about getting the Dante card for my X32 console... but that was quickly dismissed.
Wound up using a Lynx AES-16e-50 (connects to the X32 via AES-50 - single CAT5e cable)
Can effectively run at less than half the round-trip latency of Dante...

we actually got it working to a good low latency, but it took serious network skills (and much fighting with Focusrite)

Jim Roseberry
Round-trip latency with Dante is also a bit higher than other solutions.
I believe it's ~10ms at the lowest (effective) buffer settings.
 

That's the kind of stuff people need to know. If I spent a load of dough on Dante technology and had to settle for something like 10ms round trip I'd go nuts.