Alistair Lambie, managing director of New Zealand’s Lampros Sound, has been steadily building up quite a collection of ShowPro lighting including LED PAR Quad12’s, Quad7’s and Hex7’s.
“They form the base of our LED colour light,” began Alistair. “We bought our first lot close to three years ago and we’ve never had any failures despite them doing thousands of hours. They really are fabulous and are in and out of our hire department all of the time.”
Alistair further remarked that they were a favourite fixture as they have no fan – one less thing to go wrong and it means they’re silent! Their compact size is great for transport particularly as Lampros use vans rather than trucks.
“They have the PowerCon connectors which are great because if they’re on the floor, people don’t kick the power connector out,” Alistair said. “They also take 3 pin and 5 pin DMX which is great for hire as is the fact that they are very robust being made from metal and not plastic.”
Having given the ShowPro LED PAR Quad and Hex fixtures such a thorough testing on the road, Alastair has the utmost confidence is recommending them for installs.
“We know they are going to work, we know people are not going to have failures,” he added. “We went through numerous Chinese brands before we got here, in fact we have a graveyard of the things. The passive cooling is again great especially as we install into a lot of churches where noise is an issue.”
Lampros also own a number of ShowPro LED Fresnels and LED Profiles, with various lenses, which allows them to offer a complete LED based rig. So instead of having to run extensive three phase distribution with heaps of cabling, it’s possible to run one single phase ten amp extension cord to a lighting bar with ten fixtures on it.
“That’s a huge benefit particularly in the hire realm where we’re not carrying dimmer packs or all that heavy power distribution cable,” said Alistair. “It also means it’s quicker to put in and allows us to go into venues that don’t have extensive 3 phase power available. We can do a large conference for a 1000 people on a single 32 amp three phase – and that’s lighting, sound and av.”
Alistair said that in terms of output, the Fresnels have been great and are definitely equivalent to a 1K standard Fresnel, if not brighter. He commented that the Fresnels and Profiles are great for corporate events as well as on stage as they emit no heat.
“We also have some ShowPro blinder bars which we love,” remarked Alistair. “In several of the venues we work in, we can’t use haze so moving fixtures are a problem as you don’t see their beam. We deliberately try to come up with solutions for that market and the blinder bars are ideal especially mixed with the LED fixtures. Being tungsten, they contrast well with the LED lighting adding mood and ambience. Plus you can run chases through them to add movement when you haven’t got movers!”
Alistair has come to realise that the ShowPro products stand for quality that lasts. He wisely comments that there are other brands on the market that look similar but at the end of the day, they’re not so choose carefully.
