Here's a setup I see all the time, and it makes me wince. A switch in every case, daisy-chained one into the next, and when it all finally comes together, a whole pile of switches stacked on top of each other. Meanwhile two or three devices sit at FOH on a beautiful fiber run, and the real load — hundreds of devices — lives in the back. It works. Sort of. But every switch you add is quietly costing you time.
Let me put it simply: every switch adds latency. It doesn't matter how expensive or how cleverly programmed it is — each hop costs you. You don't have to take my word for it; open the Dante setup on a Yamaha CL5 and watch it ask you for more. A couple of switches deep, it wants 1ms. More switches, 2ms. Keep stacking, and it's offering 5. The network is asking for more time because you gave it more hops to cross. So I build the other way, with two simple rules. Devices always go in a star — never daisy-chained through each other. If a rack has two Axient receivers, each one runs its own line to the backstage switch. Two reasons: every device sees the same latency, and if the first one dies, the second keeps working. Chain them, and the first one to drop takes its neighbor with it. And switches go by position, not by box. Not a switch per case — a switch per zone: FOH, backstage, monitors, and extras for broadcast and recording. The devices star into their local switch, and the switches link to each other over trunk lines — fiber for the long runs, a short CAT run next door. Fewer switches, shorter chains, equal latency, and a system that grows by adding a zone instead of a mess. One more thing I always do: hang a small router off the master switch and let it serve addresses from the center. I learned that one the hard way. On a big show, another company swore they had no DHCP server running. They did — a powerful one, way out at a delay line. So some of the hung speakers pulled addresses from their server, some from mine, and the network quietly fought itself. A few hours going device by device, and it was sorted; after that, all 300 speakers came up clean on my switches, and the whole system — wireless, four stage boxes and one for broadcast — ran comfortably under 5%. That's the difference between a network that was designed and one that was assembled. How do you lay out your show network — by case, or by position?