Page 66 - Lighting & Sound America (December 2019) Magazine

TECHNICAL FOCUS: PRODUCT IN DEPTH

ETC Relevé Spot

By: Richard Cadena

That ETC is an initialism for “Electronic
Theatre Controls” is the worst-kept
secret in the industry. Although the
company started strictly as a manu-
facturer of lighting control systems, I’m
guessing that its luminaire sales prob-
ably easily surpassed its console and
dimmer sales with the introduction of
the Source Four in the early 1990s. I
distinctly remember visiting many pro-
duction companies back then and
seeing pallets of Source Fours coming
in the front door and pallets of the fix-
tures they replaced going out the back
door. But the company’s relationship
with automated lighting is a bit differ-
ent.
After acquiring automated lighting
manufacturer High End Systems in
2017, ETC jumped into the moving
light pool for the second time. The
company helped forge the way for the
acceptance of LED-based luminaires
in the theatre after acquiring the
Selador product line and subsequently
introducing the Source Four LED and
Source Four LED Series 2; the new
Relevé Spot could help theatres with-
out unlimited resources to acquire
automated lights.
True to the company’s theatre roots,
ETC’s newest automated moving light
is designed for the theatre. It is an
LED-based fixture, which should come
as no surprise, and it has a calibrated
four-color additive mixing system simi-
lar to the ColorSource Deep Blue,
which is one of the keys to its appeal.
To theatrical lighting designers,
color is everything. Early LED color- The ETC Relevé excels at producing a wide gamut of pastel colors; it’s very quiet, and
it’s priced right for educational and regional theatre.
mixing fixtures used red, green, and
blue LEDs, which, in theory, provide a
means of mixing any color. But ago, Rob Gerlach, a founding owner of relentless pursuit on the part of manu-
because LEDs are narrow-band emit- Selador, theorized that adding a lime facturers of LED emitters, this
ters, this scheme actually yields a fairly LED to the RGB mix would help realize changed in 2014, when Lumileds and
small color gamut; it also tends to pro- a more complete color spectrum and OSRAM both launched lime LEDs. It
duce very saturated colors, less-than- thus a more extensive color palette. turned out that Gerlach was right, and
ideal color rendering, and lower color There was only one problem—lime now, like the ColorSource Deep Blue
quality—not great for the theatre. Long LEDs didn’t exist. But, thanks to the fixture, the Relevé Spot has red, green,

66 • December 2019 • Lighting& &Sound America