ACL definition

[indyld]

Came in PAR64 and PAR46

And PAR36.

 

These lamps were always run in open white because anything in front of the glass burned.

Regularly used with Colormag in front of them.

 

I also recall a special PAR36 sized 9 lamp bar with long nosed cans and ACLs series-wired from a 15A plug. The 9 lamps preserved some lamp life and the thing was great as an upstage centre behind-drummer effect.

 

I'd forgotten about hamster boxes and using shorting plugs on 4 lamp soca-fed bars. Most of the ACL 4-bars I used were 'proper' ones that were wired specially.

[Salazar]

Good Morning Gents (and ladies),

 

Well, here we are about two years later and back to this thread. I'd like to find the most direct replacement for our ACL's (if such a thing exists).

 

We are on the North American side of the pond and we use a number of bars of 4 x ACL's (Aircraft Landing Lights) wired in series, usually with no colour. The bars of ACL's in our theatre use "GE 4553 (24799) 28 volt, 250 watt (Screw Terminals PAR46)" lamps. We have 4 of those bars in use. They make nice tight pools on the floor for a interesting sort of industrial looking breakup, and the fanned beams look good washing the back traveller from the floor, or weaving through a scaffold set, and the beams look great in the haze, depending the show at hand.

 

As noted throughout the thread above, they are very hard on lamps, and when one fails on a 4 bar, it often takes out the other 4 as it dies (I think the one that goes first sometimes drops to low resistance for a moment and the voltage spike blows the others).

 

I'd like to replace them with the nearest modern equivalent and I don't know what that is (if it even exists). I'm not looking for a multipurpose moving head fixture to replace them (we have lots of wiggly lights now), more something like an LED pinspot, but with the powerful beam of our existing ACL's. It doesn't need to move or change colour (but colour changing would be fine if they did). They need to be smoothly dimmable, especially down low, steppy dimming at the bottom end is horrible. If that means they plug into a dimmer circuit, fine. If I need to send them DMX, that's fine too. We have an ECT ION Xe20 to run them so no problems there.

 

Most of our kit is good quality stuff, if a bit old, ETC Sensor Rack, Vari*Lite VL1100 TSD & AS's, Martin TW1's and so on. This is a theatre that often does plays with actors who are not miked so these need to be as silent as the ACL's they would replace. I'm looking to get about 16 to 24 of these.

 

Any suggestions? Does anything close exist ion the market?

 

Thank you.

 

Ken H.

http://www.highlandartstheatre.com/

[csg]

one possibility may be showtec / highlite's part no.30743 - which claims to be a par64 ACL replacement with 3 degree optics. I very much doubt it will have the nice glow on / off of the 28V ACL lamp, but it is LED so likely to be far less of a faff when a lamp fails.

[Salazar]

Thank you for the suggestion of the Showtec LED Par 64 Aircraft, I hadn't found that before you pointed me to it. I'm a little worried how it will dim at the low end but I see it has a number of different dimmer curves accessible through DMX control so perhaps it will work fine.

 

https://www.highlite.com/en/30743-led-par-64-aircraft.html

 

http://www.regicler.be/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/showtec-aircraft-acl-led-30743_MANUAL_GB_V1-1.pdf

 

Actually I'm having trouble finding anything else like it, in part because most searches lead me to actual aircraft LED retrofits that aren't meant to dim so are useless in a theatre application.

 

I've asked our local distributor to find me a price on these, thanks again.

[Don Allen]

Any idea if this fixture would be suitable as a mirror ball pinspot due to the narrow beam width ?

[Salazar]

Any idea if this fixture would be suitable as a mirror ball pinspot due to the narrow beam width ?

It has 18 emitters so it will result in many more reflections off the mirror ball, so it may look really interesting, or it may look very muddled. I'd certainly try to borrow one and see.