The Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Verbrugghen Hall is a world-class venue with exceptional acoustics and is their largest performance space.
The venue featured mainly Par cans for its lighting plus there were two control systems; a Dynalite system and a simple conventional DMX show light system. The time came to switch to an LED lighting system with all fixtures incorporated into one system.
When choosing new house lights, a fixture with a similar profile and footprint was required to save on installation costs. Enter the ShowPRO Moonlite house light with a highly efficient optical system and HSIC colour mixing system!
“The Moonlites fit snugly into the cutouts in the ceiling so that saved us a bit of a hassle,” commented Jarrad Salmon, Technical Production Services Manager for Sydney Conservatorium of Music. “The obvious advantage is that we now can change colour but most importantly, the Moonlite fixtures are quiet. That was a real game-changer for us. Fan noise is a big deal with a classical orchestra as most of the performances are unamplified. So, when you’ve got a heap of fixtures with a little bit of fan noise, it adds up quickly. So, the fixtures being as quiet as they are, have ticked all the boxes.”
The ceiling of the Verbrugghen Hall now hosts 36 x Moonlite 150 Hex and 37 x Moonlight 70 Hex with Jarrad noting that they have performed exceptionally well.
“We used to change conventional fixture bulbs frequently and, as the roof space is a challenge, there was a lot of WHS harnessing that we had to do to physically access the previous system,” he said. “With the Moonlite LED fixtures, the maintenance cost has been significantly reduced.”
A new hybrid Ethernet/DMX lighting data distribution network was implemented during the upgrade to allow for flexibility to place fixtures anywhere throughout the venue or control the rig from any operating position inside the venue. Utilising the ELC dmXLAN Switch GBx 10 and dmXLAN Node 3 truss Mount FI with POE, a modular DMX system was made to achieve this and since the nodes are configurable to be an input or output, they now have the luxury of choosing the console location as well.
It was important that the upgraded lighting system could be run with or without the lighting console, so 4 x DMX Scene Players were placed around the room at each entry location to trigger a dmXLAN ShowStore GBx. This allows autonomy in the venue when staff need to recall presets without a lighting operator present. Also utilized were some Theatrelight 4-way and 8-way DMX splitters.
The hall has a mezzanine that hangs over the stage causing shadowing, especially where double bass players would want to be positioned. So to get enough light on their music, four Prolights Cyclorama 50s were used to combat the shadowing.
Four Ayrton Diablos were added for functions as well as a couple of ShowPRO FC profiles to highlight and colour-wash the organ.
