PL+S: Optocore Festival Box premieres in Frankfurt
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Having already proven the versatile fibre-based technology in the broadcast industry - marketed through its close technology partner BroaMan - Optocore has responded rapidly to the growing demand from the live sound community for a more elegant and efficient signal transport system.
The Festival Box is based on the BroaMan Repeat48WDM media converter, which uses Repeat48-2Fiber modules at its source. This provides several specific models with different conversion options. The standard SFP modules allow any protocol to tunnel over the same fibre.
Explaining the design rationale to the assembled press, Optocore applications engineering manager, Maciek Janiszewski, comments: “We have called it the Festival Box because it is perfect for festival situations when multiple bands are appearing, each sound engineer bringing different consoles, and running different protocols to the stage box.
“All can now be transported using just a single duplex fibre, thereby saving a tremendous amount of cabling between FOH and stage.” And because the SFP optical module transceivers are hot-swappable they can simply be exchanged to meet any demand.
In conclusion, Janiszewski summarises the benefits to production companies: “What makes this so perfect for the rental market is that the Festival Box supports all fibre protocols as well as Cat 5 Ethernet-based standards or even HDMI – it doesn’t need to ‘know’ the protocol, it will just pass it transparently. The customer can use the SFP flavour of choice to achieve simple connectivity.”
(Jim Evans)
