Colin Ritchie is the Co-Founder of Voyage Audio. Voyage Audio was one of the three winners of the 2025 PILOT Innovation Challenge.
IP microphones are rewriting the rules of broadcast audio, delivering plug-and-play ease now and limitless scaling later.

Broadcast Audio Is Evolving

Broadcast infrastructures have gone IP-first: cameras plug into network switches, video routers run in software and production engines live on Ethernet. Yet audio capture still relies on analog cables, patch bays and rack gear. The traditional chain (mic → cable → preamp → A/D → network interface) delivers stereo in a handful of locations today, but it cannot scale to immersive formats or hard-to-reach placements without rewiring every time you add channels or change layouts. Viewers now take surround sound for granted – Dolby Atmos and other immersive formats are built into modern TVs, soundbars and headsets. Flat stereo feels outdated, and legacy workflows simply cannot keep pace.

Spatial Mic Dante: All-In-One, IP Native

Spatial Mic Dante incorporates that entire analog chain into one compact, network-native microphone. Inside you get eight high-performance capsules, eight preamps, a premium analog-to-digital converter, onboard DSP and a Dante/AES67 interface. Power (via PoE), pristine audio and full remote control travel over a single Ethernet cable. From the Voyage Audio MicNet Control app you set gain, switch polar patterns, rotate the direction of capture and choose the output format (including stereo polar patterns, 5.1.4, 4.0.4, Ambisonics, etc) – all in real time and without touching a patch panel.

Real-World Flexibility

Spatial Mic Dante has already earned its stripes in the field. At major football games and pre-shows, crews have dropped the mic where no analog backbone existed. Professional andcollege basketball broadcasts have featured it mounted to stanchions and then remotely aimed the polar pattern depending on the camera angle. Film crews use it as a virtual shotgun mic for run-and-gun shoots. In studios and live concerts, it replaces vast mic arrays for drum-room and room-ambience capture, decoding the eight-capsule feed into stereo, surround or immersive mixes in post. Spatial Mic Dante has even been used for live VR streaming, bringing total immersion and audio head tracking right into headsets.

Future-Proof and Scalable

When you need more channels, you don’t pull new cable. Simply deploy additional Spatial Mic Dante units on the same Dante network and reconfigure them in the app. The real magic isn’t routing eight independent channels – it’s the built-in DSP, which packages those capsule signals into any format you need directly onto the network. Output is format-agnostic and IP-native, so it plugs right into whatever’s next: Atmos, Ambisonics, MPEG-H or ATSC 3.0. But even if you’re just in stereo today, you get faster setup and total remote control. One Spatial Mic Dante investment covers today’s stereo needs and tomorrow’s immersive ambitions without swapping hardware.

Next Steps

Capturing everything from nature’s whispers to the roar of a crowd, Spatial Mic Dante and MicNet 8-Pre deliver exceptional fidelity, adding depth and realism to audio captures. Plug-and-play operation and future-proof features support evolving audio standards and technologies, making them ideal for professionals seeking unmatched audio capture quality and innovation.