Poland - Experienced sound engineer, Bartosz ‘Bartek’ Kurkowski has found Optocore to be a vital component in the stage production of Polish singer songwriter Dawid Podsiadło.
The artist’s massive 360° arena and stadium tour is the biggest to ever take place in Poland, and Optocore’s M8 MADI device has been at the heart of a playback that runs additional tracks, clicks, cues and timecode at both FOH and monitor world on a DiGiCo loop.
Explaining the underlying reasons for adopting the M8, Bartek said, “I decided to use MADI for this set-up to give maximum flexibility, in case we needed to expand track count in the future.”
The challenge, he said, had been to incorporate MADI streams into their Optocore loop. The M8 MADI switch can do precisely that, providing four MADI input and four MADI output ports, offering 256 digital audio I/O capacity on coaxial or fibre MADI.
The sound engineer was duly introduced to dealers Audio Rebel, where he was fortunate to meet former Optocore man, Dawid Somlo who responded to the tight deadlines by first demoing the larger M12, before realising that the M8’s capacity would be sufficient for their needs.
The FOH desk set-up comprised a pair of DiGiCo Quantum 338’s in mirror configuration at FOH (with additional UAD racks for extra processing), two DiGiCo SD9s on monitors (also mirrored), two DiGiCo SD racks, with the M8 providing MADI streams in the Optocore loop.
Production then used DirectOut’s Exbox BLDS as a MADI switcher between their two redundant Ableton playback setups.
Bartek reports that the playback system had been “rock solid”. He said, “Switching between two Ableton rigs was absolutely seamless, no audio artefacts whatsoever.”
Likewise, Optocore’s M8 enabled seamlessly integration of the MADI playback system with the existing Optocore loop. “This greatly improved the flexibility of the system and made it failure proof with the help of DirectOut’s Exbox device. The two devices together really changed the game for us and made it so easy to develop further in the future.”
He added that during multiple crash simulations the timecode kept running with no interruptions on lighting consoles. “The system is super flexible, allowing us to add additional tracks in a matter of minutes in case we needed to, and it is also future proof.
“We are really happy with the outcome so I’m now keen to recommend more systems of that kind to other bands or organisations.”