At Sunday’s 57^th Annual GRAMMY Awards® FiberPlex’s WDM-16 fiber optic multiplexers and FOI-6010 workboxes, two newcomers to Music’s Biggest Night®, were instrumental in getting music from the stage out to the final mobile production truck for broadcast.

“When Mike Abbott and I first spoke about what methods we were using for MADI to MADI on single-mode fiber is when we decided FiberPlex was an option for the GRAMMYs,” said Joel Singer with Music Mix Mobile (M3), which was responsible for mixing the live music from the stage inside the Los Angeles Staples Center to the broadcast truck outside.

When it comes to broadband AV, it’s optical fiber all the way for Hillsdale College in Michigan. The independent private college started running high-speed, secure optical fiber across its indoor track using our audio optical technology in May and is now gearing up for another, longer optical run that will shuttle multimedia across its campus.

It’s lights, cameras and a whole lot more action for massAV as a result of a new FiberPlex Technologies optical snake recently added to its linecard.

The live event AV staging and production company in Billerica, Massachusetts, purchased FiberPlex’s WDM optical multiplexer to create what massAV Director of Operations Aaron Raymond calls the ultimate production snake. “We build a lot of very high end video systems, and when you start adding multiple lines of HD video along with audio, data, lighting and control for an event, it really has to be fiber,” he said, adding, “We’d been limited in our use of fiber until now because it meant having to set up an optical transmitter and receiver on every single channel, and that got expensive.”

It was a double pass for optical fiber at Sunday’s NFL Pro Bowl game at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, where copper cabling took a beating due to excessive moisture buildup from the rain.

“The issue with copper wasn’t noise for a change, it was water,” said Jeff Kang with Custom Audio, Kaneohe, Hawaii, which has been providing sound reinforcement for Pro Bowl for over 10 years. Fortunately, this year, Kang had contacted FiberPlex Technologies about a MADI-to-optic conversion box for his Avid Profile live audio console in order to run optical fiber across the stadium, and thereby bypass the problems associated with a copper run.

A growing number of sound engineers and producers are getting on the fiber optic bandwagon. Among them is Sam Kopper, who rolled out the FiberPlex LightViper™ fiber system yet again Friday from his electric green school bus-turned-studio van for a headliner event at Sculler’s Jazz Club near Boston.

As the executive producer on record for mixing the “Live from Sculler’s” radio broadcast series aired on WGBH 89.7, the most recent broadcast of which took place on Friday celebrating the 70th birthday tour of legendary jazz fusion and vibraphone performer Gary Burton, Kopper arrived a few minutes before the show to oversee the setup of the LightViper audio snake from his nearby bus studio, known as Gypsy Dancer.

An impromptu “plugfest” involving a new FiberPlex converter box earlier this month at the Las Vegas labs of top AV integrator AVDB Group solved a recurring problem with the growing number of platforms using the IEEE AVB set of protocols for AV streaming.