PTP (Precision Time Protocol, IEEE 1588) distributes a shared clock across a network with sub-microsecond accuracy — far tighter than NTP — by having devices exchange timestamped messages and measure the path delay between them. That precision is what professional audio-over-IP needs: in AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110, dozens of separate audio and video flows must stay sample-aligned across a facility, and PTP is the common timebase that makes it possible. A grandmaster clock anchors the network and everything slaves to it. For an audio engineer, PTP is the invisible infrastructure that lets uncompressed IP streams from many devices be mixed and switched as if they shared one cable.
