Like many orchestras dealing with the lockdowns from the Covid pandemic, the San Francisco Symphony has been reinventing and regrouping in finding new ways to bring music to audiences, including incorporating the recording and streaming of audio and video content in an approach utilizing technologies from Luminex — supplied by Allied ProTech, the company’s U.S. channel partner — to bring it all together.
One of the challenges, explains Jon Johannsen, audio engineer for the San Francisco Symphony, is capturing the orchestra when members can’t play together as an ensemble. “With wind and brass players in particular, we can’t have that many musicians together in a common space. People still need to be isolated in individual capture rooms.” As a result, the Symphony has created literally dozens of individual capture spaces on site. “We’ve now created capture rooms everywhere – downstairs, in dressing room areas, on alternate stages, all throughout the facility.”
The logistics and bandwidth demands of simultaneous audio and video capture from 50 or more multiple sources calls for a network that’s more complex than what the symphony had previously employed. “Our old analog workflow was pretty straightforward,” Johannsen recounts. “We had a series of capture microphones over the stage, with all inputs coming to Merging Technologies recorders in a central location in the booth. We were doing full 122-input captures, but the network was not central to the system. One moderately managed switch could handle everything because there wasn’t really a true network.”
Post-pandemic that workflow became obsolete almost overnight, he adds: “The new task was to distribute between all these Merging Technologies devices and all these different locations. This meant that we needed a stable network designed for this type of capture, that would work within our Ravenna-based ecosystem.”
The new network backbone includes a Luminex GigaCore 26i network switch as well as three GigaCore 14R and14R-PoE switches and nine SFP Multi Mode transceivers. “We needed a network backbone that was reliable, robust, and delivered PTPv2 in a very predictable fashion,” Johannsen explains. “I had previously used Luminex, and knew it was pretty much the go-to choice for us.”
The fact that the players are far removed from each other makes a smooth workflow even more critical: “For the musicians, the technology must be entirely transparent – everything just has to work. Knowing that the network backbone is solid and bulletproof enables us to focus on the artists and their workflow needs.”
Johannsen also points to Luminex Araneo software as an essential tool for overseeing the network. “The San Francisco Symphony organization has a lot of stuff going on in the facility, and data integrity is always critical, particularly when we’re doing a capture,” he concludes. “The first thing I do when I come in every day is power up Araneo and look at my network. Araneo is the product we used to talk about needing , but didn’t seem to exist. It allows for true end to end, real time monitoring of the performance of our Ravenna network; the kind of information that used to take hours of effort to simply just collect, and it does it seamlessly running in the background.”
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