Capital Sound builds 'largest ever' Optocore network for Roger Waters at Hyde Park
The surround sound extravaganza kicked off the 10-day BST Hyde Park 2018 festival
Capital Sound provided its largest ever Optocore network for Roger Waters at British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park on July 6.
The sound production company has deployed an increasing number of its Optocore converters at the festival since its inception in 2013., providing digital signal transmission over optical fibre across the site.
For the opening day of the festival, Roger Waters brought his Us + Them tour to the UK for the first time, following his Desert Trip tour in 2016 which included the biggest surround sound system ever built.
Capital was asked to provide an additional 12 loudspeaker hangs on towers positioned through the concourse for the first night of the 10-day festival.
This 12-point surround sound set-up required Capital Sound’s Robin Conway to design a new Optocore multi-node system based around 21 x X6R-FX-8AE/8MI interfaces and an Optocore DD32R-FX at FOH to accommodate an AES signal distribution.
Capital deployed all their own Optocore interfaces with Gilles Bouvard’s GB4D in France supplying additional surround sound units—linked by 24 lengths of multimode fibre across 1km of the site to create the loop—and the DD32R-FX AES interface.
Capital project manager Robin Conway explained: “I wanted to run the show AES. The feeds onto the network were all AES and the system was clocked from the Dante network. Everything this year was digital and synchronous.”
Reviewing the control set-up, he added: “This was the first time we had run a DD32R-FX at FOH and certainly I have never programmed an optical network of such a size. But Optocore is so good it just runs and runs. Once we had synchronised issues such as fibre speed, sampling rate and had assigned IDs to the various devices, everything just fell into place and worked fantastic.”
Capital general manager Paul Timmins said: “We used existing delay masts where possible for the surround sound to minimise the number of additional Optocore nodes we needed to create but still needed to erect a further nine towers, all of which had to come down at the end of the show.”
Account manger Martin Connolly added: “Roger Waters’ sound team – including sound engineer Jon Lemon, system tech Dean Mizzi and Josh Lloyd, who did the set-up with our system tech Toby Donovan, achieved everything they wanted. All have sent us positive emails thanking us.”
Source: mi-pro.co.uk
