Attracting 350,0000 worshippers to the Indian city of Jalandhar, the three-day Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan spiritual festival found production company Sound.Com using a sound set-up based around an Optocore network and using a JBL FOH system.

‘The organisers needed the reassurance that we could deliver, and after we had walked the field 2,000 feet from the main stage to see how far and wide we needed to cover the audio, we realised that with Optocore control and digital transport there would be no problem,’ says Sound.Com MD, Warren D’souza. ‘With solid networking, extensive audio processing and superlative measurement this was just another day in the office.’

Using Optocore’s 2.14 protocol in a ring topology, and a combination of single- and multi-mode fibre Sound.Com was able to deliver the signal digitally over the large coverage area.

D’souza’s Mumbai-based live event production company was an early adopter of Optocore technology, using large systems for events including the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi and The Oman Tattoo in Muscat. Fielding a top-tier crew, Sound.Com designed the system on a digital audio transport network using proven and Optocore devices. The set-up used Optocore DD4MR-FX, DD2FR-FX, DD32R-FX, X6R-FX (16MI), X6R-TP (16 MI) and X6R-TP (16LO) interfaces.

‘This provided the solid foundation and backbone of this project’s success, assisted by Dolby Lake processors to handle delay and EQ over the large distances,’ D’sousa says. A redundant analogue back-up was provided as a precaution.

The PA system, consisting primarily of JBL VerTec, comprised a total of ten 48ft-high sound towers evenly distributed over a distance of 2,000ft, with an array length of 12 boxes each. D’souza and Sound.Com chief engineer, Sunil Karanjikar, measured each stack to ensure accurate delay measurements over the huge distances.

Each loudspeaker tower was assigned to an Optocore OptoRack, which managed the signal and enabled local control. The immediate OptoRacks were linked to each other by Tactical Multi-Mode fibre cables and the redundant loop was closed by a 1.2km Single-Mode fibre cable — from the last delay stack back to FOH.

‘This is an outstanding feature of Optocore to be able to use a combination of Single- and Multi-Mode devices on the same unit, providing immense flexibility on projects like this,’ D’souza notes.

‘Optocore has given us an extremely robust and secure way of transporting broadcast quality audio on all our projects, and the proficiency with which it does this really makes the task easy,’ says Sunil Karanjikar. ‘I am really looking forward to the future and many more projects with Optocore.’

The event itself was composed of prayers, discourses and devotional music, with the highlight being His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj ji. ‘The moment everyone was waiting for was to hear his speech over the PA system,’ reports D’souza. ‘At that point we knew it was it was “mission accomplished”.’

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