Optocore Festival Box Allows All Protocols To Tunnel Over The Same Fiber
April 20 2018, 01:10
With the festival season fast approaching, Optocore chose the Prolight+Sound 2018 to launch its new Festival Box. Having already proven the versatile fiber based technology in the broadcast industry — marketed through its close technology partner BroaMan — Optocore has responded to the growing demand from the live sound community for a more elegant and efficient signal transport system, with a hot-swappable SFP solution that will radically streamline multiple-band festival bills. Hence the name Festival Box.
With the festival season fast approaching, Optocore chose the recent Frankfurt Prolight+Sound show to launch its new Festival Box. Having already proven the versatile fiber based technology in the broadcast industry — marketed through its close technology partner BroaMan — Optocore has responded to the growing demand from the live sound community for a more elegant and efficient signal transport system, with a hot-swappable SFP solution that will radically streamline multiple-band festival bills. Hence the name Festival Box.
Maciek Janiszewski with Optocore founders, Tine Helmle and Marc Brunke.
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, such as 12 duplex SFP slots multiplexed into a quad fiber, 6 duplex SFP slots multiplexed into a duplex fiber, 6 duplex SFP slots plus 12 BNC (which can be used for 3G-SDI and coax MADI) ports, 24 BNC ports, or 12 BNC ports.
The key-seller for Festival Box is that standard SFP modules allow any protocol, including all audio networking flavors, to tunnel over the same fiber. And because the SFP optical module transceivers are hot-swappable they can simply be exchanged to meet any demand.
Explaining the design rationale, Optocore Applications Engineering Manager, Maciek Janiszewski, says, “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 fiber, thereby saving a tremendous amount of cabling between FOH and Stage.”
In conclusion, Janiszewski summarizes the benefits to production companies by saying, “What makes this so perfect for the rental market is that the Festival Box supports all fiber protocols as well as Cat5 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.” www.optocore.com
