With the festival season fast approaching, Optocore chose the Prolight+Sound show in Frankfurt to launch Festival Box. With the technology already haven proven itself at Optocore’s close broadcast 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, such as:
- 12 duplex SFP slots multiplexed into a quad fibre
- 6 duplex SFP slots multiplexed into a duplex fibre
- 6 duplex SFP slots plus 12 BNC (which can be used for 3G-SDI and coax MADI) ports
- 24 BNC ports
- 12 BNC ports
The standard SFP modules allow any protocol to tunnel over the same fibre.
Optocore applications engineering manager Maciek Janiszewski (pictured above) said: “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.
Janiszewski added: “What makes this so perfect for the rental market is that the Festival Box supports all fibre 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.”