Hi,
I'm in the process of building a new pc, and I'm between the AMD Ryzen 9 7950x and the Intel Core i9 13900k.
After posting here and there on forums about the subject, and after receiving very helpful advice, I though I was going to go with AMD.
But I own a Tascam ML-32D converter, which I bought about a year ago, and the idea has always been, after buying the tascam converter, to pair it with a DANTE PCIe card, after building the new PC.
So before clicking on the buy button, I decided to research a bit more for compatibility issues that might exist, mostly concerned by the fact that by the time I bought the converter, I slowly saw PCIe Dante card become discontinued.
And while searching, I found this article by Universal Audio, about the incompatibility between Ryzens and UAD-2 PCIe accelerator cards (which is also a product I was looking forward to buy after the pc build was done).
That made think a lot, so I decided to get directly in touch with the only two manufacturers of Dante PCIe cards available at the moment, Focusrite and Marian, although you can't find anywhere in the world a PCIe Dante card in stock.

That's what Marian Told me:

and following up:

On the other hand, that's what Focusrite answered:

Followed up by this, after asking some clarifications:

In the meantime, I also contacted Thomann, mostly for stuff not related to this subject, but, since I was writing to them, I thought I'd asked if they knew anything about what was going on with DANTE PCIe cards, and that's what they told me:

And that's when I decided I had to also ask AGAIN Audinate about the matter, since I had already sent an email asking them about the PCIe card lack of stock around the world a few weeks ago, before finding all this out. I'm still waiting for a response.

I bought The Tascam converter because it had a high AD/DA channel count, and the best price/quality ratio, and I also though that the DANTE protocol was somehow future proof, being the most popular AoIP protocol on the market, and being AoIP the new kid on the block among protocols.
But, after going though all the 40 pages or so of Dante enabled products, under the interface cards category, I realized that Audinate is probably losing the PRO AoIP game, in favor of other AoIP protocols, or even more, in favor of older Digital Audio protocols which I though would soon become legacy, like MADI, AES, ADAT, or even USB and Thunderbolt!
The manufacturers in that category are mostly unknown to the broader public, they are super niche, and not directed to Studio/Live users, they're more like broadcast maybe, and convention oriented, and other miscellaneous specific categories.
I was probably wrong with my prediction one year ago when I decided to go DANTE, although, I don't know exactly what's going on with what Thomann cites, the difficulty for Audinate to get their chips, it might just also be a temporary thing.
What do you guys think/know about this?

RME Digiface Dante

edit: out of production now too ..

This seems nuts to me.

Yeah, it kinda is really. It seems like what thomann told me is probably true.

I think a big part of this is due to the shortage of chips needed for DANTE cards :(

The UAD issue was not specifically AMD CPU's but the mobo's and was probably to do with PCIe4 which was new at the time. the new intel and AM5 are now on PCie5!

Anyway on my ASROCK 570 board a new BIOS solved the UAD issue and mine worked fine from then on.



M

I thought Audinate marked the PCIe card EOL before the chip shortage hit. End of 2018 or something like that.

iirc several of the other Dante PCIe cards relied on a chip/driver software from Audinate. iirc that includes Yamaha.

New card here soon: Marian Clara-e

Its not really a chip shortage. As they could crank out thousands of these within a week.

The truth is AMD bought the FPGA chip manufacturer Xilinx back in Feb. of this year and like all AMD based marketing, they starve the market before releasing their "new and improved" models.

This might be a good thing, because the professional audio recording world needs motherboards that are "Audiospecific":

Power isolated USB jacks, on board FPGA's for processing, and even integrated Dante. (yes, I can dream can't I )

What I would suggest to the OP is get DVS for the recording side, and a dante device that has an integrated mixer like a Linx Hilo or get a 96K dante mixer to run the monitoring because all computer based monitoring sucks. I don't even know why they waste programming a DAW for monitoring because its not functional due to most interfaces are not real time.

this is correct. chip shortage = no cards.

Hi!
The UAD article though specifically talks about incompatibility with ryzens. Plus I guess the fact that the new chipsets have PCIe5 even worsen the incompatibility issue, for example the Clara E is PCI Express Base Specification 2.1.
Though I of course don't know anything really about the real reason of this incompatibility, I can only rely on the information I get form people that know better than me, like, focusrite said that it's clearly a hardware incompatibility between ryzen based systems and their product, they didn't say it also involves Intel chipsets.
By the way, the fact that a bios update solved your problem with uad is good news.

Well, thank you man! That's really helpful and interesting info you've got.
So if that's true, I guess I was totally wrong thinking that Audinate is loosing the game, on the contrary, this sounds like AMD and Audinate are going to be close partners, and maybe as you say, even integrate DANTE directly on AMD based motherboards, this could really move the needle towards Audinate even in the Recording industry, being that you could directly interface with your converter at low latencies and high channels count without the need of a third party card, heck, I guess that if this happens, even converters would disappear, and an 8 channels preamp could be connected directly to the network. And well, integrated audio DSP on motherboards would be massive, though, I don't think it will soon be a reality, mostly because it's quite specific. Integrated dante though could be much closer I guess, if this partnership becomes a reality.

About the last bit of your post, I think I'm going to stay with the tascam and pair it with the Marian card which has an onboard 64 channels direct monitoring mixer with a 4 band full parametric eq on each channel, and 8 submixes with dynamics. I guess the price is the only downside, from the outside at least! I can only know about compatibility after buying unfortunately.

I guess soundgrid is now the most "real time system" you can get, with processing added, I'm not sure really, I don't know where something like Pro Tools HDX lies for example, and soundgrid it's more a live oriented platform, and it's of course an all WAVES one, which is a downside for me, since I want to be free to use whatever plugin I want.

By the way, Audinate got back to me, that's what they answered:

well that sounds a bit more promising, hope yo find your solution

Just as an aside, regarding UAD and the windows platform, to be honest their tech support isn't very good IMHO. It's rare i ever need tech support from a manufacturer but on the few times i've needed it with UAD I've had really poor advice/help. They're very responsive don't get me wrong but they're not very knowledgeable IMHO and have become very Mac centric over the years.

They could do with spending less on their PR and more on writing decent windows drivers for their products , it's obviously NOT a priority to them it would seem.

I'm only saying this as a way of letting you know I wouldn't trust what they say regarding anything to do with windows. They had me buy a new motherboard @$250 expense and that was NOT the cause of the issue. After that experience I transitioned away from UAD completely and kept a card around for legacy recalls. fast forward a few years and I bought a UA Apollo TB, dreadful windows drivers... I sent it back after tech support told me i was using it in the wrong way by wanting low latency!!!

Anyway back on topic




M

Just for the record I think Norbury is right in that it wasn't the chips but the motherboards that were incompatible, and it was also a problem on a few Intel CPU boards. It's limited to solo, duo and quad cards and it was a problem on PCIe 3.0 as well.

Just to be clear, the alleged incompatibility issue is with UAD kit, nothing to do with the EOL of Dante cards ?

Re PCIe compatability; It's supposed to be backwardly compatible all the way to v1.0a. eg a v1.0a card should work in a v5 slot.