CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Neutrik Group Americas will unveil the NEUTRIK TRUE1 DATA connector series, built to support high-performance data standards, during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The company’s TRUE1 DATA connector platform includes mediaCON TRUE1, etherCON TRUE1 and opticalCON TRUE1.

The TRUE1 DATA connector series is a mechanically rugged, standardized platform purpose-built for fixed installations and mobile production applications. The series delivers secure, high-speed connectivity in environments where durability, ease of integration and operational reliability are essential.

At the core of the TRUE1 DATA Connector series is a unified mechanical platform that integrates three media types into one consistent architecture: mediaCON TRUE1 with USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 1x1, 5 Gbps) and USB Power Delivery 3.0 up to 100W; etherCON TRUE1 featuring RJ45 with CAT6A performance supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet; and opticalCON TRUE1 offering two-channel fiber optic connectivity available in both multimode and single-mode versions.

By combining these standards into a single mechanical platform, NEUTRIK ensures consistent handling, streamlined system design and simplified integration across multiple connectivity formats. This shared architecture allows engineers and system designers to standardize panel layouts and workflows while supporting a wide range of signal types, from high-speed data to fiber transmission.

The TRUE1 DATA Connector Series is engineered for applications where mechanical stress, environmental exposure and frequent mating cycles are part of daily operation. Some of its key features include ingress protection up to IP65 / IP66 / IP67 (in mated and locked condition), 1440 hours of salt spray corrosion resistance, UV-resistant certified materials and an airtight design for RJ45 and USB-C connections, making the TRUE1 DATA Connector Series well-suited for outdoor productions, OB vans, remote broadcast operations, rental staging, touring and temporary indoor or outdoor installations. Robust construction also supports long service life in high-cycle environments.

The connector series implements usability features like a locking cable connector that enables one-hand operation, color-coding options for fast identification, minimal integration space requirements, replaceable and customizable sealing caps and easy chassis integration via standardized D-Size format.

The TRUE1 DATA Connector Series will be available in June 2026.

See Neutrik at 2026 NAB Show booth C4735.

More information is available on the company’s website.

Neutrik Group Americas will feature its NEUTRIK opticalBAR fiber breakout solution, including its opticalCON ADVANCED line of connector products, during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Smart fiber distribution allows centralized management of multiple signals across a broadcast facility or between sites. The NEUTRIK opticalBAR is a compact, rugged fiber breakout solution that is IP65-rated when mated or capped. It is designed for professional fiber distribution, including connections to camera systems, audio networks, DMX and intercom systems.

Fully compatible with the opticalCON ADVANCED series, the opticalBAR is available in five different variants for single-mode (SM) and multimode (MM) fiber with a range of connection points, such as opticalCON QUAD SM and MM, opticalCON DUO SM and MM connectors and opticalCON MTP 12 SM and MM.

Neutrik’s opticalCON provides a flexible and reliable solution for network breakout points where space and time is at a premium and fast deployment and breakdown are essential. The company’s opticalBAR also offers various mounting options, such as mounting holes for screws, Velcro straps and pegs and truss clips, which will be available soon.

The complete line of opticalCON ADVANCED solutions will also be shown. These include opticalCON DUO, opticalCON QUAD, opticalCON MTP and opticalCON SPLIT. The ADVANCED line provides all the features and benefits of the original opticalCON but with an even more robust and field-ready design.

See Neutrik at 2026 NAB Show booth C4735,

More information is available on the company’s website.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Neutrik Americas (NAM), a wholly owned subsidiary of Neutrik AG and a member of the Neutrik Group, has acquired its long-time business partner and customer, Major Custom Cable (MCC).

Headquartered in Jackson, MO, Major Custom Cable is a manufacturer of data and communication cables. With a ISO 9001 registered facility with over 50,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing and warehousing space, the company offers a wide range of products for the communications and IT industries. 

The deal will help Neutrik’s efforts to expand into new markets and additional expertise to Neutrik’s management, the companies said. 

“Neutrik has a long and successful history with Major Custom Cable as both a customer and a supplier—and the company has always impressed us with their capabilities, quality, and fast response times,” explained Peter Milbery, president of Neutrik Americas. “For more than a decade, Neutrik has pushed to expand into new markets with our ruggedized copper- and fiber-based locking, circular connectors. The acquisition of MCC will help us accelerate this push to diversify into new markets. At NAM, we are thrilled that we will now have U.S. based manufacturing in addition to our existing global manufacturing capabilities. We look forward to a long-term and close relationship with MCC.”

Clark Hurrell, president of Major Custom Cable, added that the “Neutrik acquisition of Major Custom Cable creates an exciting future for our employees. The combined expertise of both teams provides our customers with an expanded product offering, increased sales support, and reduced lead times due to the USA-based manufacturing capabilities of Major Custom Cable. Everyone at our company sees this acquisition as very positive, and we look forward to taking our combined efforts to the next level.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Neutrik USA, a supplier of connectivity solutions for audio, video and data, announced the hiring of Jeff Lowe as National Sales Manager for Broadcast & Professional Video. Lowe’s experience in broadcast and post-production techniques and technology will enable planned expansion in the broadcast/pro video market.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., native joined the engineering staff of ABC Television in New York City early in his career; then on to Immix as a demonstrator and salesperson for its Video Cube software. From there, Lowe moved to Apple in Cupertino, Calif., working with QuickTime. With the launch of Final Cut Pro editing software Lowe helped bring Final Cut Pro to the broadcast television market.

Pointing to a high point in his career, in 2009 Lowe was involved in the building of a brand new broadcast and post-production facility for NASCAR in Charlotte. When not travelling, Lowe is stationed at the company’s headquarters in Charlotte.

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CHARLOTTE, N.C.—With the new NE8FFX6-W, Neutrik USA has introduced a new feedthrough coupler that works with both etherCON Cat 5 and etherCON Cat 6A cable carriers, as well as standard RJ45 plugs.

The NE8FFX6-W features 10-Gbit bandwidth along with IP65 ingress protection when mated to cables with Neutrik’s NE8MX6 family of etherCON Cat 6A connectors. It also features a unique barrel design different than its cousin, the NE8FF.

Neutrik will make the NE8FFX6-W available in Q3 2017.

SEATTLE—The term future-proofing gets thrown around a lot when customers evaluate components for an installation. But when designing and specifying products that make up the skeleton of the infrastructure—cables, wire and connectors—it’s also a good idea to evaluate whether they will serve well into the future.

Steve Lampen, Belden On the subject of future-proofing, Neutrik product manager Fred Morgenstern quoted Yogi Berra: “‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’” But Morgenstern did venture his own prediction: “In regard to broadcast signals on the acquisition and editing sides, the question appears to be not if facilities will move beyond HD signals at 3GHz, but rather when.”

He said it’s still up in the air how the industry will solve the challenges presented by these higher bandwidth transmissions. “Will the industry stick with tried-and-true SDI over coax?” Morgenstern mused. “Will we primarily migrate to Category [Ethernet] solutions? Or will fiber optics finally become the default option?

“Furthermore, as the industry migrates to IP-based workflows, allowing heterogeneous signals to be multiplexed over evermore powerful and inclusive hardware, what are the best physical carriers to transport those signals? Whatever choices facility designers make, we think that Neutrik has some compelling options.”

LEMO developed its 3K.93C connectors for SMPTE 304 standard 30 years ago, a standard that is still in use today.THE STATION OF TOMORROW
Bryan Carpenter, senior sales consultant for Bittree, said his company will introduce a new connector product at the upcoming NAB Show. “There is some momentum in the industry on trying to push UHD uncompressed video down a 12 Gbps coax line.”

According to Carpenter the new product will “be utilizing our MiniWeko-type plug. It’s re-engineered, because of all the high frequency and the precision involved in the parts. So this is where the miniBNC is gaining. It’ll be miniBNC on the back and Weko on the front end.”

Though the new product is being developed for uncompressed UHD transmission, Carpenter said customers will also find use for it in the HD world. “The advantages are that you not only run UHD across one single line, but you can also run eight 1.5 Gbps SDI lines or four HDSDI lines on that same coax cable.”

With the acquisitions Belden has made in recent years, its NAB booth has become massive. Steve Lampen, multimedia technology manager for the St. Louis-based company said the technical infrastructure to drive displays and demos is similar to the TV station of tomorrow. “We decided that the ‘Engine Room,’ [the part of the booth that houses storage and playout] which is traditionally out of sight, should be out in the middle of the floor so people could see how it’s wired up.”

He pointed out that while some have declared certain cable and wire to be “dead,” the booth will feature “equal amounts of coax, twisted pair, 10G data cables and fiber. And this is kind of the ‘station of tomorrow,’ at least at this point, some kind of amalgam of these three technologies. There’s no clear winner in any direction.”

In the future that may be less true, said Lampen. With the data world a hundred times bigger than the video broadcast world, “suddenly broadcasters are learning that this is a great way of putting stuff together because you could move the control room to the other side of the building by changing a couple of patch cords in a patch panel.” At its NAB Show booth Belden will show its new 10GXS CAT6a data cable, with a significantly smaller diameter and an absorptive layer to counter alien crosstalk, the bane of smaller diameter data cables.

OB Truck Market Demands Rugged Cables & Connectors

According to Shadath Shahid, engineering manager for Canare, preparing for the future means being able to handle higher bandwidths. “As technology’s evolving, everybody’s trying to get everything faster and quicker, and optics are one of the fastest ways to transmit signals,” he said. “We find that a lot of companies that used to use triax cable are now converting to complete fiber. That’s including some truck builders, stadiums and arenas that are using this fiber technology.”

For the rugged OB market Canare offers its SMPTE Tactical fiber. “It’s a more robust housing, with an outer jacket, and we use bend-insensitive fibers so it doesn’t break easily,” Shahid said. “It’s like a tough-shield cable, so it’s resistant to damage. It meets up with the conditions and comes out perfectly fine.”

The Fischer Connectors FiberOptic series is sealed to IP68 and can be cleaned with any water source for transmission without loss of data, making them perfect for mobile units and outdoor events regardless of the weather.Canare’s Tactical Fiber is slimmer, which allows for a lower weight per 100 feet.

One way to look at future-proofing is not just by meeting the future performance specifications of an installation, but also providing a product rugged enough to physically last into the future.

Rick Hobbs, director of business development at OCC (Optical Cable Corp.), a Roanoke, Va.-based provider of fiber-optic cable, says the company builds its products for durability. “Things are going to last, because we come from a military background,” he said.

But though OCC’s products like its B Series Mil tactical fiber cable are designed to meet military specifications, Hobbs said remote truck users of cable “are more harsh on the durability of the cable than military applications. They’re throwing things over the stands and pulling it through, and they have a short amount of time to set up in these venues, and when it’s set up they don’t want any issues to deal with.”

Connectors are a similar story. When system integrators at Mobile Studios saw a need for more robust fiber-optic cable and connectors, they formed Tactical Fiber Systems (TFS) to fill that need. “We saw more and more people going into high-definition sports production,” said Richard Rubin, president of the Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based company. Affordable connectors for fiber cable were often very fragile, so “we came up with our own connector and cable combination that was very robust for video production [and] field production.”

The weak point in many of these connectors was the exposed male fiber sticking out. “Our Magnum Connector is unique in that it’s a solid piece of machined stainless steel, and the connector itself has got female connections, so the fragile fiber tips are inside the connector,” Rubin said. This allows a stainless steel cap to protect the connector when the fiber is being pulled. Mud and water are a fact of life for OB broadcasters. “With all of our competitors, the mud will get inside all the mechanical components inside the connector, and it’s going to be a nice mess to clean,” said Jacques Miéville, product manager for Fischer Connectors. “So the broadcaster must send the whole reel back to the guy who supplied them.”

Fischer attacked this problem on two levels: “On the interface we have an IP67 ceiling, which prevents any water or debris or dirt to go into any of the mechanical parts of the connector, of the terminal, the fiber optic terminal.” With the mechanical parts isolated, a crew member “can really clean it properly in the field,” Miéville said. “And this is really interesting for broadcasters because when their connector is really dirty, they can have the first level of maintenance on the field for the connector.”

John Orona, sales and product manager for Lake Cable, pointed out the ever-increasing need for OB broadcasters to watch their weight. “Weight in the trucks is everything,” he said. “Every ounce counts on a truck.”

So Lake Cable set out to engineer a lighter ruggedized replacement for traditional 9.2mm SMPTE 311 cable that could carry the signal a similar distance. The STEALTH Special Ops cable is 7.8mm in diameter with a polyurethane jacket that’s flexible and more durable than traditional jackets while easily sliding over sticky surfaces. Lake Cable also replaced the 16-gauge steel conductor with a Kevlar strength member, “It’s stronger and lighter than steel,” Orona said. “In fact, it’s 33 percent lighter than the traditional 9.2mm cable overall.”
Craig Johnston

INVESTING IN PROTOCOL
Steven Lassen, manager of product and applications at LEMO, said that a good way of judging a company’s ability to make future- proofed equipment going forward is to look at how well they’ve future-proofed their earlier devices. Three decades ago, the Swiss-based company developed its 3K.93C connectors to meet the needs of the then new SMPTE 304 standard.

“That technology is still in use today, and we see it in support of 4K, UHD, and 8K UHD to the studio,” Lassen said. “So for futureproofing, we look pretty good with the existing connectors even today, 30 years later, and beyond.”

Lassen said that the company wanted a hybrid type of configuration, “so there are two fiber-optic contacts, what LEMO calls the ‘F2’ type, which is a 2mm, as well as two high-voltage contacts and two signal contacts.”

As to the future, Lassen said it starts with improvements in protocol. It’s up to “the industry to develop the protocol for the future, and we’re willing to work with the industry to do that,” he said. “Of course you can only get so fast over copper contacts, so eventually, at some point, for higher bandwidth type of things you’re going to have to change over to fiber. And we’re working on that.”

As the broadcast industry moves toward video over IP—where data cables replace traditional coax or fiber—Steve Cooper, vice president of engineering for Chicago-based Switchcraft, said the specifications of the cable and connectors are critical for CAT5, 5a, 6 or 6a cables to deliver future performance.

“We try to specify and obtain the best cable that we can with the least number of dB loss per foot, so that we can get the maxi-mum distance,” Cooper said. “So you have to look at your connectors, make sure your connector meets the spec, and also you need to verify the connectors when terminated with the cable you’re using still meets the spec.”

The most common RJ45 data cable connectors are built to withstand little more than air conditioner fluctuations in the single digits, with none of the environmental conditions OB truck crews are accustomed to. So Switchcraft has developed RJ45 Weathertight Connectors that are sealed to IP67 and IP68 NEMA 250 (6P) when mated.

Corning Cable Systems has traditionally been focused on fiber and cable manufacturing for the B2B market, but the company has looked into the needs and future needs of post-production houses and sees a market to address.

“Post production facilities and video production facilities use a ton of cable, especially to connect up with their storage devices,” said Sang Min (Joshua) Yoon, product line and marketing manager for the Emerging Applications team for USB and Thunderbolt Active Optical Cables for Corning. “Previously it was very hard to connect any sort of devices that actually were six or 10 feet away from the devices they wanted to connect to.”

With Corning’s Thunderbolt and USB 3 optical cables, “we were able to eliminate the inconvenience of multiple cables and connectors with one simple cable that is able to provide a ‘plug-and-play feature,’ and it works. A lot of the facilities are now running as much as 200 feet from PCs or laptops are to where the connected devices are located.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Robin Fraser has been officially announced as the new regional manager for Neutrik in the southern region. Fraser took over the position in early October and is responsible for sales activities across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida.

Robin Fraser

Fraser’s previous positions include vice president of Channel Comp LLC; a consultant for small diversity businesses; and multiple positions at Premier Farnell, including serving as the global account manager.

Fraser will be based out of Atlanta and oversee customer relationship initiatives.