Adlib has made a sizeable investment in Ayrton fixtures by adding Khamsin-S, Bora-S and Diablo LED profiles and wash lights to its inventory, purchased from Ambersphere, Ayrton’s exclusive distributor for the UK.
Established in 1984, Adlib is one of the longest-established event technical services company in the UK, providing hire, sales, and installation of professional audio, lighting, video, rigging and staging equipment across the whole spectrum of the live events industry.
“Adlib’s policy is to look to the future of technology and be at the forefront of what’s coming next,” said Head of Lighting and Video, Tom Edwards. “Over the past two years we have seen significant growth in both our lighting and video departments as the markets we operate in change and expand. We focus on lasting relationships with clients over many years, so it’s exciting for us that some of the fantastic companies and artists are developing along with us and we can support them across such a wide spectrum of live events and special projects.
“To facilitate this, we were looking to add some big, powerful LED fixtures that were bright enough to handle the areas that we are growing into – fixtures that were comfortable in arenas and larger venues, with a full feature set, framing shutters, CTO wheels, and all the other essentials. The Ayrton products ticked all of these boxes.”
Edwards first spotted Bora and Khamsin at a tradeshow in the company of Ambersphere: “It was the quality of light coming out of the Bora wash light that caught my eye and especially impressed me,” he said. “It is very rare that you see something in the ‘bread & butter’ range that excites – and on the face of it the Bora specs seem nothing out of the ordinary – but when I saw the fixture, it was like seeing something new and ground-breaking!
“Standing in the beam, you could almost feel the light, which is testament to how good the glass optics are. Add to that the fact you can get air effects out of it, and it has an absolutely massive zoom range which can cover an arena stage with just 8 units – well, there’s not many lights that can do that. It really stood out to me.”
24 Ayrton Bora-S wash lights and 40 Khamsin-S profile spots, both of which are capable of producing 40,000 lumens from their 750W LED sources, were initially purchased from Ambersphere for the Gerry Cinnamon tour, designed by Pete Hutchinson of Illumination Creative Design. “Khamsin is an absolutely solid workhorse light for us and it will form the backbone of many shows to come,” states Edwards.
“Much of Adlib’s work is with broadcast and many of our shows are either recorded or broadcast,” explained Edwards, who has a very strong video background, “so it is very important to be able to fine tune colours to assist cameras. The first thing camera engineers have to do, especially when working with LED lighting, is pull a lot of green out of the cameras to obtain correct skin tones. But in making the skin tones correct, you are not being true to the colour that the light is outputting. So, when you are looking at the effects on screen, they are not necessarily the colours and effects that are happening in real life.
“But the Ayrton Khamsin and Bora have a ‘minus green’ filter built into them so, instead of correcting it in camera, you can fix it at source. The result is that you get a lovely skin tone in real life and in camera, straight out of the fixture, which is a really big plus.”
The new Bora and Khamsin fixtures proved such a hit that Adlib made a follow-up investment in 24 Diablo LED profile spots – powerful, fully-featured, compact 300W units that pack a 19,000 lumen punch – which immediately went out on tour and were initially used on tours by Sam Fender and Asgeir designed by Liam Tully. “Having a coherent range is important to us and we decided on Diablo for similar reasons to its bigger brothers,” said Edwards.
“We wanted something we could put into the same rig as Khamsin and Bora to give us a range of fixtures which can cover all sizes and style of venue and show. The big advantage of Diablo is its small size compared to what it is capable of doing: they’ve got an incredible feature set for such a little light and they are very, very bright for such a small fixture – they really do pack a punch!”
“Now we have been working with the Ayrton fixtures for some time, we remain very impressed. Reliability has been a huge positive factor for us and we are seeing much less in terms of in-tour maintenance. The Adlib road crew have commented that they are not spending their down time fixing issues, but instead are able to focus on a better delivery the tour by ensuring the LD and PM have all they want. Ayrton has made a product range that is very investable.”
“We are proud that Adlib has entrusted the heavy lifting tasks of lighting their arena and broadcast applications to our Khamsin and Bora,” said Ayrton’s Jerad Garza. “The output and consistency of these fixtures, and that of the smaller Diablo, will continue to give them returns for many shows to come.”
