Entec Live has extended its Optocore fibre network device investment, raising its Record and Returns racks capabilities, and future-proofing them for arena, stadium and festival events increasingly being served.

The move follows the production company’s initial investment in three M8-BNC Madi switches for the Gorillaz world tour in 2022. Supplied by Optocore dealer HD Pro Audio, these allowed a Pro Tools rig to be connected to Optocore-enabled DiGiCo SD7 digital consoles.

So successful was the deployment, that Entec Live has now added a further M8-BNC and, equally significantly, five X6R-FX-16AE interfaces (one with SRC sample rate conversion option, the other four without), creating an Optocore PA Returns rack that will become the de facto system for shows over the coming year. Again, the order was fulfilled by HD Pro Audio.

‘Gorillaz – and by extension Blur – now have a Record rack that sits on the Opto loop with the two consoles and allows them to do virtual soundcheck,’ says Entec Live Technical Manager, Peter Eltringham. ‘They can multitrack record the whole gig, and can listen to play back at both ends of the multicore.

The Pro Tools rig being used has a capability of 196 channels at 96kHz, and Entec Live used three M8s to get the channel count required. This was extended with the addition of a further M8-BNC this summer.

The new X6R converters made their debut with Blur at their two recent Wembley Stadium shows. Eltringham explains that the four devices without SRC provide AES output in the amp racks. ‘Two AES units in each amp rack provide hardware redundancy, over and above the redundant power and loop topology that Optocore units provide. This means our backup signal to the amplifiers is the same as our main, maintaining audio quality.

‘The design for the amp racks was never to have signal coming in, so they didn’t require SRC; however, the other one at FOH is effectively the “ingest” for the system and does have sample rate conversion. This can handle different incoming signals without a problem and feeds it out to the units in the amp racks.’

‘It’s really the entire backbone for distribution, with a DirectOut Prodigy which is the drive system that sits on top of it,’ adds Entec Head of Sound, Dan Scantlebury. ‘We can run AES out of that into the SRC-enabled device.’

Entec took over The Other Stage at Glastonbury this year and the new Optocore drive system will be used in 2024 – as well as many other sites – as Entec Live moves away from Dante.

‘We had been talking about moving over to Optocore for PA returns, sending the signal back towards the amps, for a while,’ Eltringham explains. ‘Technology like Dante and other networked topologies offer flexibility but the great thing about Optocore is it does one job and does it extremely well, on its own separate system. It handles the task of audio transport so well and reliably that you simply trust it for your console. When people ask about the redundancy and resilience, I simply say, “Well, your FOH mixing desk runs on that system and you trust that. If you trust it for your FOH desk, for your monitor desk, for your broadcast you can trust it to get the signal back to the PA”.

‘Too many times I have been in a situation where the wrong connector in the wrong place has ruined the Dante network or has pressed the wrong check box and there’s really not a lot of that you can do wrong with Optocore. There’s not the temptation as with other network protocols to put other traffic on it so that all of a sudden it falls over and you’ve lost your show.

‘This is the start for us, and in time we can tack more things onto the loop. Although this time around at Wembley we used just AES to talk to the delay amplifiers, in future iterations we could easily add in some extra devices and extend the loop.’

Scantlebury foresees further investment in Optocore’s fibre solutions as the scale of events Entec Live undertakes warrants a higher level of redundancy to safeguard larger shows: ‘This will basically now be our arena return system for the rest of the year,’ he says. ‘And it’s infinitely expandable.’

More: www.optocore.com