TMC's Roland Higham says: "We had a major problem with transfer of audio from the performing areas to the FOH control area, the main one being that we could not lay cable across the main road in front of Harewood, due to the amount of traffic involved in this event, plus the distances involved would have put 'copper' alternatives at their maximum transmission distances unless we had added 'booster' boxes'. As it happened on the day, we ran out of time to put the catenary in place to facilitate the cable runs over the main road, we had over 200m of the Optocore 's 'Kevlar' armoured twin fibre available, so we took the cable which only weighs 9kgs in total and fixed it to the top of the gable end of Harewood and ran it to the top of our control tent, where it was connected to its' 'B' box and brought back into the analogue domain. The system ran faultlessly. On a job of this magnitude we knew we had to get it right, as there were broadcast and TV feeds from the Optocore as well. With the added advantage over traditional heavy copper systems, Optocore also has a software patching system, which is invaluable. Roland goes on to say the advantages of this technology are too long to list, weight only being one part of it, distance being another. I believe that Optocore will become the standard, due to numerous advantages over copper, any new technology will find resistance at first, but like other technologies in the digital domain they are finally accepted."
(Lee Baldock)
