At PLASA 2010 in London, Optocore announced a significant upgrade to its popular DD32E network interface — offering increased featureset and efficiency, reduced carbon footprint and a significant decrease in price.
When it was launched in the early part of the new millennium, the original DD32 quickly became an AES/EBU conversion standard. “With a couple of thousand of the DD32E I/O network converters now serving some of the most demanding installations around the world, it was time to look at how we could improve this device,” states Optocore’s sales and marketing director, Tine Helme. “The new DD32R meets the challenge head on, offering all the features of the DD32E plus many new ones. Due to a combination of careful design, streamlined production and adoption of the latest technologies we have been able to reduce costs by a massive 30%.”
At the same time the DD32R provides a reduced power consumption of 40%. “Although a power draw of 22 Watts was still fairly unbelievable for a fully-featured, multi-gigabit switch with 64 AES lines, we knew we could improve this further,” continues Helmle. “So now we have reduced it to 14 Watts. Compare this to a computer infrastructure, with 1G and 10Gb switches and imagine how many thousands of power plants could be spared if they used our equipment!”
The new R Series device also provides double fibre bandwidth, offering 2GBit operation, for 1024 input channels per ring (plus unlimited number of output channels). This makes single rings even more powerful and stacked rings for an unlimited number of inputs even easier to implement.
Providing a further significant advantage, the DD32R includes a full 100MBit Virtual Ethernet Switch over the entire network. “When using Optocore over the long distances, our 100MBit works better then most 1GBit Ethernet devices,” promises Helmle. “On top of that the Virtual Ethernet Switch provides redundancy without the need for special programming.”
Via the SANE port the network designer can become highly creative, enabling him to add analogue channels, further Ethernet and MADI devices to the network.
All ‘R’ series devices will operate down to minus 20 degrees Celsius and feature 50µ hard gold plated connectors for premium quality and long life. |
|