Optocore
Fibre-optic audio, video and data transport built as a redundant ring, used where very high channel counts have to travel long distances with deterministic latency: stadiums, festivals and broadcast compounds.
Continuous streams that are large enough to be sized properly, and that must arrive in order and on time.
What kills it. Anything that starves the link — usually a management transfer nobody scheduled — and jitter that outruns the receive buffer.
What it carries
- Sample rates
- 48 kHz, 96 kHz, 192 kHz
- Audio channels
- up to 1024
Audio: The 1024 figure counts inputs. Outputs are effectively unlimited because the ring carries every channel past every node, so any device can tap any channel without costing anyone else bandwidth — the architectural difference from a switched network, where each subscriber's copy is real traffic. Channel count and sample rate trade against each other on a given ring speed.
What goes wrong
Typical use
- Long fibre runs between FOH, stage and broadcast
- High channel-count festival distribution
- Redundant ring backbone for a large audio system
Sources
- Optocore system overview 10.1 — Optocore primary
- Optocore — Optocore primary
Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, implementations. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.
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