Auckland Town Hall’s Concert Chamber is part of the Auckland Live entertainment precinct and is a preferred venue for those entertainers whose art form lends itself to a more intimate setting.
Entertainment Lighting Solutions (ELS) were recently contracted to upgrade the dimmers in the Concert Chamber as the venue wished to upgrade to a more modern solution than the aging Strand LD90 dimmers. As all of the venues within the Auckland Live precinct utilise ETC consoles, with the Concert Chamber housing an ETC Element, it made sense to look for an ETC dimmer solution.
“They wanted the consoles to work seamlessly with the dimmers over Ethernet,” explained Nick Abel, managing director of ELS. “Consequently we installed the ETC Sensor3 dimmers which feature the advanced feature modules which allows the dimmers to be modified from the console. That means from the lighting operation position, you can turn the dimmer into a switch or dimmer circuit, on or off or a permanent hard power circuit.”
This has been an immense advantage for the lighting crew at the Concert Chamber as their dimmer room is located in a very inconvenient spot—up a ladder, at the back of the venue. Within this room, the new ETC Sensor3 dimmers are neatly and compactly presented in one self-contained rack – a big difference to the old dimmers that wrapped around the room!
The CEM3 power control has reduced setup time, simplified system backups, and removed all barriers to networking the lighting system, plus the plug-and-play features are invaluable. Sensor3’s plug-in modularity allows for more configurability, customisation and easy maintenance.
“It’s all integrated with their existing ETC system, running over the ETC Net3 network that’s in the venue,” said Nick. “We added dual processing to the rack so that it has two brains to allow for redundancy. If the primary processor fails, the backup processor will run the system.”
The rack offers 96 dimmer circuits all of which have Advanced Features modules that contain embedded voltage and current sensors. These sensors constantly monitor circuit-status information, which is analysed by the control electronics to diagnose and report circuit-specific load changes (individual lamp failures) or module faults.
Malcolm Ibell, head of lighting for Auckland Live, describes the purchase of the ETC Sensor3 dimmers as a “no brainer” as they were the only dimmers that matched his specifications 100%. “The ETC Sensor3 dimmers have been fantastic and I aim to buy more!” he commented. “There are no other modular dimmers on the market that give us the ability to switch to pure relay bypass on the actual dimmers. Plus they integrate incredibly well with the rest of our network; all of our nine venues are networked via fibre-optic and all units save back to a central file server. This solution is totally seamless and means we can take any console from any room, plug it into another room and it works! Plus you can grab shows from another room, so it’s very useful. Touring acts can also plug directly into our network no matter what console they have, as long as they can talk and stream ACN, they talk to all of our dimmers.”
Malcom and his crew enjoy the benefits of not having to routinely access the dimmer room, although he took into account the fact that because you can switch the Sensor3’s from dimmer to hard power from the console it can also be undone from the console – a feature that initially concerned him.
“Consequently one of my main specs was the ability to physically go to the dimmer module and flick a switch which bypasses the dimmer and turns it onto to just straight power,” he said. “It was important for me to have it locked off, I didn’t want it to be modified from the console so suddenly a lot of movers didn’t have dimmer power. No other company in the world can supply modular dimmers that can do that.”
