Let me stand up for Audinate for a minute, because they've earned it. They built a genuinely beautiful network — and proved, over and over, that it runs rock-solid on a single line. Even Audinate will tell you a single clean network is the simplest, most reliable way to run Dante. So where did all the redundancy trouble come from? Honestly, I think it came from pressure — nervous engineers who wanted a safety blanket, maybe a little marketing push. A secondary network got added, with its own address range — the secondary on 172, the primary on the familiar 169.254 — and the two were named "primary" and "secondary." Fine. The engineering was never the problem. The problem is how people use it. Instead of keeping it simple, they overcomplicate — cross-patching primary and secondary on the wrong switch — and the moment it misbehaves, you hear the same verdict every time: "Dante is broken."
It isn't. The wiring is. I can usually show them in ten minutes. I open Dante Controller, and there it is — a device sitting on the primary with a 172 address, where it has no business being. That one detail tells the whole story: somebody crossed primary and secondary on the wrong port. What's been a dead system to them all afternoon is a ten-minute fix for me, because the address gave it away. So no, I won't throw stones at Audinate. They did their job, and did it well. If anything, the real mistake was deciding the show needed redundancy mode at all. Because when I genuinely need fault tolerance, I don't lean on a software second network. I build it the old, honest way — physical. Two trunk lines, separate paths, bonded so the show rides straight through if one is cut. A forklift doesn't care about your secondary VLAN; it cares which cable it just rolled over. The tool was never the issue. The complexity was. Thirty years keep teaching me the same lesson: keep it simple, and the system — and the next tech who has to read it — will thank you. Ever lost an afternoon to "broken" Dante that turned out to be one wrong patch?