STAGE EFFECTS AND BLUE ARRAY ROCK OPPIKOPPI 2015
By Jesse Dullabh, Lighting Technical & Controller Support
The Oppikoppi celebrated its 21st anniversary this year and naturally everything went bigger and better. An estimated 25,000 people trekked to the bushveld outside Northam in the North-West Province for a weekend of music, camping and, of course, partying till the sun comes up.
The logistics and technical production of such a big event featuring five arenas can be a nightmare if it is not planned with military precision. This year Stage Effects and Blue Array were contracted to provide lighting, sound and AV technical solutions for the 5 different arenas. A major difference this year was this inclusion of the Luminex and its networking capabilities that allow for ease of control. Luminex is a complete networking solution that allows for different networking protocols to be managed with ease.
Marinus Visser, head of audio at Blue Array, was introduced to Luminex at MediaTech this year. He immediately realized that the product was what he has been looking for as a networking managing tool to run the multiple and different sound protocols. The user-friendly, yet powerful user interface is one of kind, and it speeded up set-up time significantly. The redundancy port abilities and seamless response times that Luminex holds were important to him. The ability to run 1 Fibre cable from front of house to backstage allowed him to spend more time on the sound development of the arenas. Regarding the communication between sound equipment, a decision was made to incorporate the lighting requirements onto the same network. The plug and play technology is associated with the specialized VLAN technology that was development by Luminex. This allows for network traffic to be managed seamlessly and in a matter of minutes … without any IT experience required! The ability for these network switches to accommodate protocols like Art-Net 1.2.3, Dante, CobraNet, Ethersound, AVB, Q-LAN, SVSI, Streaming ACN, MA-Net/MA-Net2, EtcNet2, Net3 are some of the protocols that Luminex supports. This list continues to grow as it is becoming increasingly desirable to use one global network to run a whole show.
Both Blue Array and Stage Effects loved using the networking capabilities of the equipment and look forward to using it again in the future.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE LUMINEX RANGE, CONTACT: Jesse Dullabh: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
VIEW THE LUMINEX PRODUCT RANGE ON ELECTROSONIC SA’S WEBSITE.