Dante Routing and Clocking
Two things have to be right for a Dante system to stay alive: every device has to follow a single shared clock, and the channels have to be routed correctly. The clock is the deeper and less obvious of the two. Dante synchronises every device using PTP, the Precision Time Protocol defined in IEEE 1588, which keeps all those clocks aligned to well under a microsecond of each other across the network. One device is elected the grandmaster — the leader — either automatically by priority or set by hand, and every other device becomes a follower, gently disciplining its own clock to match the leader's. If two devices both believe they are the leader, or the leader itself is unstable, the result is clicks, ticks, and dropouts that sound for all the world like an audio fault but are really a timing fault.
Routing is the more visible layer, and the one you interact with directly. You create subscriptions that map a transmitter's channels onto a receiver's inputs, usually in Dante Controller or through a console's own interface. A missing subscription gives you silence; a wrong one gives you the right audio arriving in the wrong place.
What this really builds, beyond the mechanics, is a diagnostic instinct worth keeping. When Dante audio starts glitching, your first suspicion should be the network and the clock — the grandmaster, the switch, the PTP path — and not the analogue gear, because the symptom is actively lying about where the problem lives.
Clock errors sound like audio problems — but they're network problems.