Now that LEDs are dropping in price a little, we’re finally seeing some products come to market that take advantage of low-heat, long-life LEDs without breaking the bank. Chauvet’s new Élan fixture aims to bring LEDs to the masses by incorporating a three-color LED bank into an other-wise standard club lighting effect. Let’s see how they did it…
Physical Description
The body of the Élan looks something like a typical theatrical luminaire with a large (11-inch diameter) effects lens attached to the front. It can be visibly (not physically) broken into two sections: The rear section is a compact housing for the power supply and electronics of the fixture, and the front section houses the LED assembly and eight lens ports. A mounting yoke is attached at the middle of the unit. It weighs 11 pounds.
All of the controls and connections are on the back of the fixture. Power is provided to the fixture through a standard IEC cable, and up to 19 addi-tional Élan fixtures can be daisy-chained by using the female IEC connector on the back of the fixture and a female-to-male IEC cable to power them. DMX512 can be connected via a three-pin XLR input and out connectors, and two knobs allow adjustment of audio sensitivity in audio mode.
Features
When you take the front hood (lens) off the Élan, the fixture reveals itself to be very straightforward. A pair of identical “cross-hair” LED arrays sit side-by-side on a rotating disc and look to the naked eye like a pair of Elton John’s sunglasses. Eighty-eight red, 88 blue and 48 green LEDs form geometric patterns of crosses and circles.
When it’s projected onto a surface, each color shows up as a well-defined pattern of fuzzy dots. Projected through a haze or fog atmosphere, the beams appear as attractive breakups.
The fixture offers both standalone and DMX512 modes of operation. There are five different standalone modes with variable sound activation, strobing and color change. In stand-alone mode, the sensitivity is adjusted using the two knobs and associated microphones on the back of the unit, one for the LED intensity and one for the motor speed, and the mode is set by using DIP switches. Up to 32 units can be master/slaved together for synchronized lighting effects. In DMX512 mode, the color, strobe rate and dousing can be adjusted using almost any DMX512 controller or con-sole.
Comments
The Élan effects have the punch of just about any other similar effect fixture. If you never popped the hood, you might not even know that they had substituted a typical incandescent light source with a bank of LEDs. (Of course, that’s why we take things apart, isn’t it?) But if you consider the saturation of the light, you’ll notice that the three-color LEDs in the Elan bring a signature look to the fixture. And when you see it strobe, there’s no doubt it’s an LED source.
In automatic mode, the only requirement is that you plug it into the wall. The light will do the rest. The three sets of color LEDs and beam rotation change based on the sound arriving at the two microphones on the fixture, spinning and changing color to the beat. (There’s a beat, right?)
Chauvet obviously has some experience with this type of audio-driven effect, and it shows. The fixture responds well to both low- and high-SPL audio in the room, with additional fine-tuning available via the two knobs on the rear of the fixture.
The (semiautomatic) DMX512 mode pales somewhat in comparison. Four DMX channels are mapped to (1) red, (2) green and (3) blue LEDs, in addition to (4) strobe and blackout settings. In this mode, the rotation of the beam is still handled on-board, with no way to stop or adjust it, and you can’t dim the LEDs; you can only turn them on and off.
The fixture’s output is a little brighter than you might expect and should maintain its light output fairly well over time. It will work well in perma-nent installations, but it should be sufficiently road-cased and cared for properly in order to troupe around.
Summary
Chauvet has done a nice job integrating LEDs into an otherwise simple and easy-to-understand club fixture. While at first glance appearing to be identical to many other club effects, this creative merging of old and new technologies offers up a new and unique beam output while taking advan-tage of the energy-saving capabilities of an LED luminaire.
Phil Gilbert is a freelance lighting designer and programmer. You can contact him at
pgilbert@ plsn.com.
