Cobalt Digital added four QxL rasterizers to its inventory to support IP ST 2110 product development and testing as part of the company’s recent expansion in production capacity.

PHABRIX QxL Sports Live Event

Cobalt Digital designs and manufactures video and audio processing products for closed caption compliance, audio loudness processing, colour correction, signal transport and related applications. As a founding member of the openGear initiative, the company also produces a range of openGear compliant systems. Cobalt equipment is used worldwide in production trucks, terrestrial and satellite facilities, and broadcast and cable networks.

During product development and production testing, Cobalt Digital uses test and measurement equipment made by PHABRIX, and is a long-term PHABRIX customer. Now, the company has added four QxL rasterizers to its inventory that will be used to support IP ST 2110 product development and testing as part of the company’s recent expansion in production capacity.

Inheriting the JT-NM Tested features of the earlier Qx rasterizer, the QxL addresses the needs of professional broadcast media IP networks in a compact form factor. The QxL supports generation and analysis of JT-NM TR-1001-1:2020, ST 2110-20 (video), up to four 2110-30 (PCM) or 2110-31 (AES transport) audio and a 2110-40 ANC media flow, all with 2022-7 Seamless IP Protection Switching (SIPS) together with AMWA NMOS IS-04 discovery and IS-05 device connection management.

PHABRIX QxL Sports Live

PHABRIX QxL rasterizer

SIPS is a method for recovering from lost IP packets and to reconstruct the original stream. A SMPTE 2022-7-enabled transmitter duplicates the input stream and sends it via two different paths to the destination receiver. The receiver, also SMPTE 2022-7 enabled, combines the streams from both paths and reconstructs the original stream. If a packet was lost on path 1, that packet is taken from path 2. Should path 1 have completely failed, the entire stream is taken from path 2 and vice versa.

Ryan Wallenberg, Vice-President of Engineering at Cobalt Digital, said, “The new rasterizers have been purchased in direct response to the expansion of our operations, which includes new offices and increased production requirements. PHABRIX equipment has been a part of our product development and testing processes for many years, and we have always found their products to be versatile, reliable and consistent.

"The remote access capabilities and the APIs, deep analysis features and built-in generators have been invaluable to our engineers through the development of successive products. So, it was logical choice for us to approach PHABRIX again for this expansion. The QxL emerged as the ideal choice due to its level of flexibility and accessible toolset.”

Phillip Adams, CEO, PHABRIX, commented on his company’s long relationship with Cobalt Digital. “We’re pleased that they have now decided to invest in four units of the QxL, a product that has really made a mark on the industry owing to its full operational flexibility and support for a straightforward migration from an SDI to an IP-centric operation.” www.phabrix.com