Live Events Move Audio and Intercom Onto IP

Live production has become the most demanding proving ground for audio over IP, and this month’s deployments read like a specification sheet. For Rock in Rio 2026, Clear-Com supplied four Arcadia central stations supporting roughly 50 wireless FreeSpeak II and FreeSpeak Icon beltpacks, with a mix of E1 and IP-connected transceivers providing coverage across the festival’s production areas. The interesting part is not the wireless layer but what it connected to: the Arcadia systems were linked over a dedicated network using Dante to TV Globo’s broadcast facilities, joining the on-site operation to an Eclipse matrix infrastructure so festival and television teams worked inside one connected communications environment. A multi-stage festival with a live national broadcast is about as unforgiving a test of clocking and latency as the industry has.

Product launches point the same way. At CABSAT 2026 in Dubai, held from 5 to 7 October, AEQ introduced the Capitol IP PLUS console — a 10-fader surface with up to 32 summing buses, an integrated touchscreen, Dante and AES67 networking and an option to be driven remotely from a PC — alongside Xpeak, an IP intercom built on a deliberately matrix-less architecture. Xpeak treats hardware and software panels as peers on one virtual network, discovers devices automatically and spans up to 28 endpoints over local, WAN or internet links, with a companion IP67 beltpack rated for 600 metres in open field. Elsewhere, DHD.audio’s compact SX2 mixer and 1U XS3 processing core, with built-in Dante and software licensing for additional features, have been deployed as a portable broadcast training system.

Two design shifts sit behind those announcements. The first is that centralised hardware matrices are giving way to distributed, software-defined architectures: intercom panels become nodes rather than ports on a frame, and console capability scales by licence rather than by installing more DSP cards. The second is that audio and video now share one Ethernet fabric, which collapses the old distinction between the audio engineer and the network engineer. The practical risks move accordingly — multicast group management, VLAN boundaries, quality of service and clock synchronisation — and they are the reason vendor certification programmes have grown so quickly.

The cable plant is where all of this becomes physical. Dante, AES67, the Milan AVB profile and SMPTE ST 2110 ride the same shielded twisted-pair copper terminated in RJ45 or etherCON; Cat5e is the floor for 100 megabit Dante, Cat6 and Cat6A cover 1 gigabit Dante, AES67 and Milan, and Cat7 or Cat8 serve 10 gigabit and broadcast plants. Bridge products, from XLR and AES3 to etherCON, are what most analogue racks buy first during a migration. Amtune builds the hardware on either side of that cable: Dante and AES67 networked audio modules for distributed audio, plus dedicated Dante modular and AES67 modular lines for OEM integration into mixers, amplifiers and conferencing devices, all manufactured under an ISO 9001 quality system and tested to CE, FCC and RoHS standards. Teams planning a networked audio project can reach Amtune at sales@amtune.com.