AES67 and AoIP Interoperability
Audio-over-IP grew up as a set of competing, proprietary systems — Dante, Ravenna, Livewire, Q-LAN — each excellent in its own right, but each speaking its own dialect, so a device on one could not talk to a device on another. AES67 is the standard that bridges them. Rather than replacing any of them, it defines a common interoperability mode they can all meet in: agreed ways to packetise the audio (using RTP), to synchronise clocks, and to find each other's streams, so that a Ravenna source and a Dante receiver really can exchange channels directly.
The keystone of that bridge is clocking. AES67 specifies PTP version 2 (IEEE 1588-2008) as the shared timing reference, and that detail matters in practice because classic Dante grew up on PTPv1 — so bridging the two worlds means deliberately getting everyone onto a common PTP profile with a single grandmaster. Get the clock domain right and the audio simply flows; get it wrong and you have the same clicks and dropouts as any other timing fault, only now they appear across the boundary between two systems.
On the wire, AES67 streams typically run at 48 kHz with small packet times around 1 ms, carried as RTP, and the very same foundation underpins the audio side of broadcast IP video, since SMPTE ST 2110-30 builds directly on AES67. The lesson to carry away is that interoperability is something you enable and then verify — matching sample rate, packet time, and PTP profile — rather than something that happens by itself just because two systems both claim to speak AES67.
Interop is a clock agreement first — match PTP before you patch.