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Signal Transportation

Cobalt offers support for the many ways in which your content gets from point-to-point. This flexibility allows you to utilize the best approaches for every situation. Here’s a brief overview of current transport media – all supported by numerous Cobalt products.

  • Fiber – Fiber transport is the best way to run high-bandwidth data over long distances since it has very little loss over distance, and also supports multiplexing (where several discrete electrical signals can be “multiplexed” onto a single physical fiber transport pipeline). Vast fiber networks are already in place, making the utilization of this infrastructure very convenient. Fiber typically supports hops of up to 24 km for HD content (this distance can be increased even farther using repeaters).
  • IP Ethernet – Compressed MPEG distribution is directly compatible with GigE Ethernet, which is becoming more popular as part of the facility data cabling infrastructure (as well as having a low cost versus other media). 
  • Serial Digital Interface (SDI) – This is the backbone of typical digital broadcast environments, as it allows uncompressed video and audio over a single coaxial cable. Most broadcast facilities are wired with the “1694A” cabling that supports this interface. (SDI supports typical cable lengths of 350m, 150m, and 80m for SD, HD, and 3G video, respectively.)
  • AES-3id – Typically called “AES” and promulgated by the Audio Engineering Society and European Broadcast Union (EBU), AES is the industry standard for discrete, 2-channel PCM digital audio infrastructure transport. This format uses the same “1694A” cabling and BNC terminations as that for SDI, thereby simplifying and economizing installation. AES typically supports distances over 100m.
  • MADI (Multichannel Audio Digital Interface) – also known as AES10-1991, MADI allows up to 64 discrete channels on a single coaxial transport. To interface between SDI embedded or AES-3id to and from MADI, a MADI embedder/de-embedder (such as Cobalt’s 9374 SDI – AES – MADI Embedder/De-embedder card) is required. MADI supports transmission distances over 100m.
  • Analog Video – Analog video is the most basic transport form (typically straight from cameras) and consists of 3-cable YPbPr “component” video or single-cable NTSC SD “composite” video. Although not as prevalent in facilities since the promulgation of digital broadcasting, an NTSC composite infrastructure is commonly in place for distribution of the “house reference” black-burst timing signal that provides a timing reference for many video and audio devices throughout the ingest and emission chain.
  • Analog Audio – As a legacy media, analog audio can still be found in at least some parts of the broadcast chain (and is still popular for monitoring systems as it is easily implemented and very flexible).

Products

  • 9901-UDX 9901-UDX 3G/HD/SD Up-Down-Cross Converter/Frame Sync/Audio Embed/De-Embed