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. 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.
