Gear Reviews

By Julius Grafton. Some time ago Roland got into the video control business as Edirol. These days they are using the Roland Professional A/V brand, and producing a growing family of professional switchers and mixers. Now the XS1-HD matrix switcher is here, a compact multi purpose 4 x 4 combo tool that does many things…

By Julius Grafton. So it’s another column system?” I say. The guys at Hills look at me like I’ve mentioned some one or some thing they don’t like. “It’s a collinear source system”, says Gerry Gavros. “A collinear source array, all in one line. This gives coherency in high frequency with better summation. Here, come…

Many stages need footlights to up-fill the actors and gently wash shadows. Traditional tungsten footlights struggle with profile and heat. This is where the Robert Juliat Dalis 862 LED footlight comes in. It has a lot of tricks, especially in the asymmetric department. This is where you can vary the wash up close and high,…

CLAY PAKY’S NEW WASH LIGHT By Julius Grafton The march of LED continues apace, the latest entrant from Italy is the long named K Eye K20 HCR. K20 is the fixture size, while HCR stands for High Colour Rendering. The ‘K’ originally stood for ‘key lighting’ but Clay Paky quickly reasoned this was too limiting.…

Lighting a cyclorama is a big deal in theatre, since even dispersion is everything and nothing shows up an inconsistency like bad lights there. Asymmetric reflectors differentiate cyc floodlights from groundrows. A cyc light throws more light up high and less down low, whereas a groundrow is a floodlight that disperses out uniformly. Designers don’t…

By Julius Grafton Xirium Pro is a Neutrik system for transmitting studio quality audio without cables. It is entirely designed for live events where you need delay towers and remote audio at full bandwidth, high quality and with virtually no latency. Until now you could attempt this on a 2.4GB or UHF wireless system, but…

Meyer Sound’s LEO® Family of linear sound reinforcement systems has been expanded with the addition of the diminutive new LINA™ very compact linear line array loudspeaker and companion 750-LFC very compact low frequency control element. Easily the smallest and lightest in the series, LINA and 750-LFC bring the inherent linearity, low distortion and exceptional power-to-size…