026 INTERVIEW
Anyone set on pioneering new technologies in the entertainment niche sector is either irrationally heroic or has extraordinarily large cojones. Take in-ear monitoring. How bonkers was that? How could it ever be expected to replace the good old fashioned stage wedge? These ‘black art’ technologies shroud themselves in an impermeable lexicon of acronyms and neologisms that require a cryptologist to decode them, while the protagonists engage in fierce competition. Yet these frontiersmen are to be commended as they usually prove to be the cornerstones of the industry’s next generation. Joining the field of available networking protocols this past few years has been Wireless DMX technology. Many methods can be used for wireless data transfer - cellular phones, PDAs, GPS, radio receivers, satellite TVs - with modern DMX enhancements including Remote Device Management (RDM). Meanwhile, signal fidelity is achieved using dual-band and Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) and Cognitive Coexistence techniques. DMX512 is, of course, the universal digital multiplex theatre lighting standard, and it was probably only a question of time before it was discovered that, in installations where cable lengths were prohibitively long, by placing a wireless transmitter at the controller end, with receivers near the fixtures (to convert the wireless signal back to conventional DMX512 wired network signals) such distances could be overcome. Pioneering the genre in Europe (and slowly galvanising the lighting community), has been Niclas Arvidsson. Founder of Swedish company Wireless Solution Sweden, its catchy W-DMX brand has steadily been infiltrating the production lighting industry since 2003. Today, four product generations after launching its fairly primitive hand-made point-to-point G1 prototype at the 2004 SIB Show in Rimini, the technology has moved on exponentially to this year’s new BlackBox G4 Mk2. So where has it all come from? The technology originally developed through using frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) technology, first used by the US Army to attain more reliable data transfers (changing frequency more than 1,000 times every second). Spread spectrum signals are highly resistant to narrow-band interference and are thus difficult to intercept. The hopping system is used in the same license-free 2.4GHz frequency band (W-Lan for instance uses 20MHz channels) enabling W-DMX to get 79 channels out of the system. This has now evolved further into the Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) spread spectrum, which improves resistance to radio frequency by avoiding using crowded frequencies in the hopping sequence (the idea being to avoid the ‘bad’ frequencies and use only the ‘good’. In other words to avoid transmitting on occupied frequencies. So much for the basic primer. Armed with little more than that, I set off in search of Niclas Arvidsson, on the day that President Gadaffi was shot dead, unsure of whether I was about to conduct a press interview for mondo*dr or try and cram a three-year Masters Degree into a single day. We met up at his base in Uddevalla, 90km north of Gothenburg. Not yet 40, Niclas
“People were only prepared to
use wireless DMX when cable was not possible and even today rental companies are thinking more
about using wireless to save on installation cost.”
Arvidsson has long been a familiar presence on the global exhibition circuit (and in various professional groups). My instant impression was of a kind of Nordic Robert Downey Jr. Niclas Arvidsson had forged his career out of the rental and distribution industry of the early to mid ‘90s. Like so many he had been beguiled by the magic of the SIB expo in Rimini and Italian product styling. Arvidsson ditched his aspirations to become a DJ at the beginning of the ‘90s, “I had bought all the equipment before I realised I couldn’t beatmix,” he said. And he set up his distribution company, Interlite AB in 1994, with SGM becoming his first supplier. He sold his rental business, temporarily diverted into sound distribution - and a new base in Upssala - before reverting to his core interest, back in his home city of Uddevalla. The concept of wireless DMX was already appearing in the States by the second half of the ‘90s, notably through Goddard Design in New York, which was focused on theatre, and later by Interactive Technologies’ award-winning Radio DMX, which
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