PoE+ Loudspeakers Retire the Amplifier Rack

Electro-Voice used the 28 October episode of rAVe's Rants & rAVes to introduce EVID-N, its first networked loudspeaker line. Instead of a separate amplifier and DSP chassis driving a constant-voltage line, each loudspeaker carries its own amplification, processing and network interface and takes power from the same Ethernet cable. The range covers ceiling, surface-mount and pendant formats, is configured from a browser, and speaks Dante and AES67 alongside the enterprise security features IT teams now ask about. Shipping is expected to start in January.

The architectural consequence is that the amplifier rack stops being a fixed line item. A 70V or 100V distributed system concentrates amplification in one place, which is efficient until that one chassis fails and takes a whole zone with it. A PoE+ system pushes that risk out to every device and, in exchange, multiplies the number of things that must be discovered, addressed, clocked and monitored. PoE+ (802.3at) delivers about 25.5W at the device, which bounds acoustic output: comfortable for speech, paging and background music in a ceiling, less obviously comfortable for a reverberant hall. PoE++ or a local supply is how larger spaces get there.

The electrical arithmetic moves as well. Twenty-four ports at full PoE+ load is roughly 612W at the devices and about 720W at the switch, before cameras, access points and desk phones are counted. Adding a ceiling full of loudspeakers to an existing IDF can exhaust a budget that looked generous the day it was bought, and the same load lands on the UPS and on the heat load of a ceiling void nobody modelled. Reach is still 100m over one cable, which is fine inside a floor and not fine between buildings. Every loudspeaker is also a PTP client, so the clock domain and the IGMP querier stop being audio footnotes and become part of the audio design.

Electro-Voice's own framing is more conservative than the category suggests: the company argues that not every installation should move onto the network, and that infrastructure, management requirements and long-term ownership should drive the decision. That is the right test. The useful questions are whether the client's IT team will maintain a switch fabric that audio now depends on, what happens at 3am when the switch reboots and whether sound returns without a laptop, and what the handover pack contains - port maps, IP plan, zone schedule, firmware baseline. Amtune supplies Dante and AES67 audio modules and modular Dante interfaces for manufacturers building endpoints into that fabric, and publishes AES67 module specifications against the same questions.