SFPs for MADI - What You Need to Know
Optical MADI is everywhere in broadcast - OB trucks, broadcast centres, temporary installations. It covers distances that coax can’t, it’s immune to ground loops, and a single fibre carries the same 64 channels as a coax cable. Most MADI-capable equipment implements the optical interface via an SFP cage, which gives you flexibility in connector type and fibre distance - provided you use the right module. This sounds straightforward. In practice, it causes more problems than it should, because the SFP cage is a standard physical form factor but the signal going through it is not standard Ethernet. Getting this wrong means no audio and no obvious error message to explain why. ...