Vermont-based Atomic Professional Audio has invested in Ayrton Perseo-S fixtures and put them to work on a New Year’s Eve event held in Burlington.
“The main use of our Perseos will be for outdoor concerts in New England giving us a unit that we can use on the downstage truss and not have to worry about inclement weather,” said Chad Voghell, Head of the Lighting Department at Atomic Pro Audio.
“We decided to replace an existing lighting system with brighter fixtures that are IP65 rated and similar in weight, with framing shutters and LED sources,” he explained. “We demoed fixtures from many different manufacturers last fall. While Perseo was not the brightest fixture in open white, once you started layering on gobos and colours and prisms, they were just as bright sometimes brighter than the competition.”
Voghell notes that in a colour test, “CMY colour appeared faster in Perseo than in other fixtures allowing for much softer pastels and no-colours. And the dimming curve available just on an encoder was the best I’d ever seen in an LED-sourced unit. There was no ‘pop-up’ when coming up from black: It felt like you were operating an incandescent dimmer. The dimmer and colour combined with the framing shutters feature made me excited to offer Perseo to our theatrical clients for dry rental.”
Perseo offered additional features that made them a good choice for Atomic Pro Audio’s inventory. “We loved the gobo patterns in the fixture, and I was relieved to know that the rotating gobo selection is the same across much of the Ayrton moving light line. That means if a rider specifies an Ayrton Ghibli or Mistral, I can offer a substitute that has the same gobos,” Voghell highlighted.
He also cited the fixture’s zoom range as a big plus. “Having something that opens up so wide makes Perseo useful on short stages as well as rooms with lots of hanging height,” Voghell said. “We operate mostly on Stageline SL320 and SL250 stages right now, so having a fixture that looks great when the trim is low is very important for us.”
Atomic Pro Audio already utilized its Perseos for Burlington, Vermont’s New Year’s Eve celebration, hosted by Burlington City Arts in a downtown waterfront park. “They performed very well in the 35º wet weather, cutting through the wash easily in saturating colours and gobos,” Voghell stated. “Their very wide zoom made it possible for them to work on our short Stageline SL100 stage. They looked great!”
Voghell is very excited to implement Perseos on projects in what appears to be a busy upcoming year. “I am looking forward to deploying them as a solution in any situation,” he concluded.
ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.