Perth Concert Hall, renowned for having among the finest acoustics in the southern hemisphere, serves as the primary performance venue for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, as well the venue hosts many diverse performances and events all year round from classical concerts through to contemporary music.
For their largest lighting update since the venue opened in 1973, Perth Concert Hall considered options for upgrading their ageing generic lighting rig. Alex Spartalis, head of lighting at the venue, was in charge of this process and said, “We wanted to replace a large number of our profiles with LED units and so shot some units out against each other. The Source 4 Series 2 Lustr from ETC couldn’t be beaten when the combined factors of brightness, colour & dimming quality, fan noise and reliability were taken into consideration.”
The venue
took delivery of 66 Source 4 LED Series 2 Lustr units in October last year. Since then the units have performed flawlessly. “We only had 1 single unit fail out of 66 and that was replaced by our WA dealer Evolution 512 and Jands promptly” Alex says. Evolution 512 also supplied a number of Jands DD8-II DMX splitters to help distribute data around to all the fixtures and Jands PDS12 Power Distribution racks to power the new system.
36 of the units were fitted with 19 degree lenses to replace the orchestral downlights, a job which was previously done with Lekos. After the swap over was complete Alex said the toughest crowd, the orchestra, were happy with both the colour quality of light and brightness. “We were able to achieve a much flatter field and even wash with the new units than before, and were even able to reduce the amount of fixtures required. Having individual control rather than pairs of orchestrals which previously covered large areas has opened up a lot of flexibility and control in isolating small parts of the stage”. Alex further commented that the flexibility in terms of being able to instantly colour the overhead wash which was previously not able to be gelled due to the awkward location of the lamps has opened up so many more possibilities. “We can do contemporary performances without the need to add trusse
s of moving colour wash lights. When we have hire budgets for our bigger shows we can now spend all that money on units such as beam / profile movers that enhance the performance rather than blowing half of it on trusses of colour washes.”
The lighting towers attached to the auditorium walls loaded with 110v pars were also replaced. “What was previously a small selection of standard rock and roll colours now has the option to give us a whole host of pastel colours for our more classical shows thanks to 22 more Lustr’s fitted with 26 degree lenses.” Alex and the PCH team found in this location that they again required less units than before, so a few of these profiles became a dedicated colour wash on the 3000 pipe organ in the hall, which now looks rather impressive.
The final 8 units are fitted with 15-30 zoom lenses as variable focus and variable purpose fixtures in a few different locations. Since the main bulk of the standard rig is now covered by the new Lustr’s Alex says, “We have even lit a show or two solely with the LED fixtures. We now have a product that we can present to our clients and say, ‘Here is a complete package,’ without putting a lot of extra gear and labour in”. The entire project was made possible through the State Government’s Department of Culture and the Arts Infrastructure Improvement Program.
