Practical AV network design, VLAN planning for Dante and NDI, IP schedules, PoE budgets, duplicate-IP prevention, and switch documentation for shows and installs.
AV networks are real networks with show-day stakes
Modern AV rides on Ethernet: Dante and AES67 for audio, NDI and ST 2110 for video, PoE for cameras and touch panels, plus the control traffic that holds it together. The engineering is standard IT, VLANs, multicast, DHCP, but the failure mode isn't a slow file share. It's silence in a room of 2,000 people.
The discipline that prevents that is boring and effective: plan the segments, write down every address, budget the power, and document the switch. A show network you can't hand to another tech on one page is a show network that fails with you as the single point of recovery.
Segment by traffic class, not by department politics, media, control, and management have different needs. See VLAN planning for AV systems.
VLAN Planning for AV Systems, A working VLAN plan for AV networks, segment Dante, NDI, control, and guest traffic, contain multicast with IGMP, and know when a flat network is honestly fine.
How to Create an IP Schedule for AV Systems, What an IP schedule is, which address space to pick, block allocation by device class, static vs DHCP guidance, the exact columns to track, free CSV template.
PoE Budget Planning for AV and IT Devices, What a PoE budget is, how to calculate it with honest device-draw ranges, why ports don't equal watts, and the headroom rule working crews plan around.
How to Prevent Duplicate IP Addresses in AV Systems, Duplicate IPs cause the strangest show-network failures. Prevent them with one IP schedule, reserved ranges, and bench config, then find offenders fast.
Document your AV network in WireFlow
VLANs, IPs, PoE, and switch ports live on the same diagram as your signal flow, one source of truth for the whole system.