Riyadh, June 12, 2025 – With summer just around the corner, it’s time for Luminex to shine. A few weeks ago, we proudly kicked off the festival season at the inaugural edition of ‘A Thousand and One’, Riyadh’s newest large-scale music festival in Saudi Arabia.
Across five distinct stages, Qafilah, Sahaab, Bizar Bazar, Bustan, and Qasr, the festival hosted both world-class DJs and rising stars, delivering unforgettable performances. Colour Sound Experiment provided complete lighting, video, and control solutions for all stages, backed by robust and intelligent networking infrastructure.
Each stage relies on a dependable network backbone built around Luminex GigaCoreswitches. Every stage has multiple racks: FOH, Stage Left, Stage Right. All connected via GigaCore switches’ ISL ports. Using Luminex’s unique RLinkX feature, the team created a redundant ring network with ultra-fast recovery, ensuring automatic fallback in case of link failure.
Each stage was routed to a dedicated backup cabin located hundreds of meters away. These cabins housed all backup lighting and video consoles, maintaining complete redundancy and operational continuity throughout the festival.
Desert temperatures can be brutal, but so is GigaCore’s resilience. Leveraging the Luminex API (available for LumiNode and GigaCore), the deployment was not only automated but also featured real-time thermal monitoring of all switches. This ensured optimal performance and peace of mind in the most demanding conditions.
“As expected, the Luminex GigaCore switches were able to provide solid performance, despite the extreme temperatures that we were faced with.” — Aramus Raynier, Network and Systems Architect
LumiNode was also an essential part of the system, offering powerful tools for DMX, Art-Net, and sACN conversion, merging and distribution. LumiNode, with its innovative processing architecture, allows multiple protocol conversions to run in parallel, ensuring unique flexibility and scalability. Features like built-in merging, failover options, and future-proof hardware make it an essential node-based solution for modern lighting networks.
To oversee the entire infrastructure, Araneo was used in combination with the MA-Net3 license. Araneo provided a clear graphical overview of the AV network, monitoring all data flows and MA-Net3 sessions in real time, helping the crew maintain full control and visibility.
The following Luminex products were used:
- GigaCore 10: 11 units
- GigaCore 10t: 1 unit
- GigaCore 26i: 3 units
- GigaCore 16Xt: 4 units
- GigaCore 20t: 11 units
- GigaCore 30i: 1 unit
- LumiNode 12: 71 units
- LumiSplit: 6 units
- Araneo
- MA-Net3 license for Araneo
Credits
Aramus Raynier – Network and Systems Architect
Tim Smith – Network and Systems Engineer
Sam (Kenny) Kenyon – Lighting Project Manager
Haydn Cruickshank – Company Director
Alex Ryan – Company Director
Tom Harpley – Video Project Manager
Sam Tozer (Vision Factory) – Lighting Designer