Founded in 2007, the award-winning team at PCC Productions have been delivering the highest quality and best value production to the Pilbara region for over ten years boasting one of the largest audio, lighting, backline and visual equipment inventories in the whole region.
Working in such a remote area of Australia, PCC can’t afford to have anything go wrong on an event as backup could be hundreds of kilometres away. Fortunately, they have discovered Omegatech’s range of products including Rackmount Distros, PowerCON 8 Way Power Drop Boxes, PowerCON Cables, Socapex Cables and Tails plus DMX Cables. Despite the harsh conditions and rough terrain of the area, Brad reports that all of his Omegatech gear has performed incredibly well and none of it has ever failed.
Five years ago, PCC’s Director Brad Holder met Craig Beatson of Omegatech when Craig decided to sell off the last of his hire stock and to take a look at it all to see if we wanted to purchase any of it.
“We drove down to Perth (1800km away from us) in our old van, and did just that,” said Brad. “We ended up purchasing loads of his old equipment. When I asked him why he was closing down his hire department, he said that he was more interested now in manufacturing new products for the AV industry. After some more digging, we ended up purchasing some of his early stock of distros and PowerCON drop boxes – a purchase that I’m very glad we made!
“The biggest thing we’ve noticed over the past five years of using our Omegatech gear is that everything manufactured by Omegatech is incredibly well made and the utmost care and perfectionism is applied from design to build,” commented Brad. “The quality of their products is second to none and the care taken to hand build and assemble every component is next level.”
PCC has a few rackmount distros in stock from Omegatech, each slightly newer than the last and Brad notes that it’s amazing to see how the product has improved from version to version. Craig has taken user feedback on board and improved them, time and time again. Even simple things such as labelling have improved and in the latest model, the internal multimeter now turns on before breakers are switched on, which is a fantastic way to ensure a power check happens before any damage is caused.
“I love their PowerCON Drop Boxes!” said Brad. “They’re one of my favourite products in our inventory and so many touring crews have been impressed by them. They’re super flexible and like their rackmount distros, have been improved from version to version. The latest version now comes with a power switch protector to stop it from getting knocked and has loads more mounting points so that you can attach hook clamps and hang them from truss to power lighting fixtures. Super flexible and a neat tidy way to get a lot of power somewhere quickly.”
The PowerCON Drop Boxes are also 20 amp boxes, so if you use them with the Omegatech distros that have PowerCON outputs, you get double the power output per cable compared to a normal 10A GPO – which makes powering lighting a breeze and easier for larger drawing fixtures. They are also brilliant for stage and backline power, as you can drop them in place and link them across with PowerCON Connectors which means no air gaps and a super solid connection that can’t be easily knocked out by bands stumbling around a dark stage.
“We recently needed to open up one of the PowerCON Drop Boxes to fault find after an event and we were blown away with the build quality,” remarked Brad. “We quickly disqualified the box as the problem as every single wire was labelled, properly terminated and overall the build was so incredibly tidy – it was easy to see it couldn’t possibly be the issue. It was also surprisingly clean inside considering we operate throughout the Pilbara in WA, where a large portion of our events is placed directly on red dirt. So much of our equipment suffers from constantly being used in 48-degree heat with plenty of red iron ore dust, yet despite the harsh environments the internals of this PowerCON Drop Box was as clean as brand new.”
Brad also states that all of the cables he has purchased from Omegatech use high-quality cable and connectors, none of the cheap knock off connectors just quality Neutrik/Amphenol connectors.
Omegatech is also a real-world manufacturer, meaning that they’ve actually been there and done that! The team has worked in the hire industry themselves, and they understand the challenges of being on the road. This means they are forever building new products to make our life easier.
The Omegatech gear has been used on everything from your typical band in a pub gig to outdoor rock festivals, outdoor cinema to high-level corporate events.
“Omegatech’s gear is reliable, we trust it with our smallest to largest events,” said Brad. “Craig and the team at Omegatech are amazing – not only do we use their products, but we trust Craig so much that he now handles a lot of our repairs even for non Omegatech equipment.”
