The its growth as a festival, the Barclaycard Presents British Summer Time festival in London’s Hyde Park has required sound production company Capital Sound to deploy an increasing number of Optocore converters to provide digital signal transmission over optical-fibre across the vast site. But nothing quite prepared them for the opening day this year when Roger Waters brought his Us + Them tour to the UK for the first time…

Having already taken his sonic and visual experimentation to breath-taking levels at Desert Trip in 2016, with the largest surround sound system ever built, the Hyde Park event saw Capital were asked to provide an additional 12 loudspeaker hangs on towers positioned through the concourse for one night only. This 12-point surround sound set-up, designed to give the audience a truly immersive experience, required Capital Sound’s Robin Conway to design a new Optocore multi-node system based around 21 X6R-FX-8AE/8MI interfaces and an Optocore DD32R-FX at FOH to accommodate an AES signal distribution.

Capital deployed all of its 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. ‘I wanted to run the show AES,’ Capital Project Manager, Robin Conway explains, ‘The feeds onto the network were all AES and the system was clocked from the Dante network. Everything this year was digital and synchronous.

‘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,’ he comtimnues. ‘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.’

This network architecture has been deployed by Capital Sound on numerous occasions and met the approval of Roger Waters’ sound team. ‘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,’ says Capital General Manager, Paul Timmins.

‘Roger Waters’ sound team – 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,’ says Account Manager Martin Connolly. ‘All have sent us positive emails thanking us.’

See also:
British Summer Time 2018

More: www.optocore.com