Adlib invests in Ayrton Khamsin, Bora and Diablo

“We were looking to add some big, powerful LED fixtures that were bright enough to handle the areas that we are growing into – fixtures that were comfortable in arenas and larger venues, with a full feature set, framing shutters, CTO wheels, and all the other essentials. The Ayrton products ticked all of these boxes.”

Edwards first spotted Bora and Khamsin at a tradeshow in the company of Ambersphere: “It was the quality of light coming out of the Bora wash light that caught my eye and especially impressed me,” he says. “It is very rare that you see something in the ‘bread & butter’ range that excites, but when I saw the fixture, it was like seeing something new and ground-breaking!

“You could almost feel the light, which is testament to how good the glass optics are. Add to that the fact you can get air effects out of it, and it has an absolutely massive zoom range which can cover an arena stage with just 8 units – well, there’s not many lights that can do that.”

24 Bora-S wash lights and 40 Khamsin-S profile spots, both of which are capable of producing 40,000 lumens from their 750W LED sources, were initially purchased from Ambersphere for the Gerry Cinnamon tour, designed by Pete Hutchinson of Illumination Creative Design. “Khamsin is an absolutely solid workhorse light for us and it will form the backbone of many shows to come,” states Edwards.

“Much of Adlib’s work is with broadcast and many of our shows are either recorded or broadcast,” explains Edwards, who has a very strong video background, “so it is very important to be able to fine tune colours to assist cameras. When working with LED lighting, a camera engineer must pull a lot of green out of the cameras to obtain correct skin tones. But the Ayrton Khamsin and Bora have a ‘minus green’ filter built into them so, instead of correcting it in camera, you can fix it at source. The result is that you get a lovely skin tone in real life and in camera, straight out of the fixture, which is a really big plus.”

The new Bora and Khamsin fixtures proved such a hit that Adlib made a follow-up investment in 24 Diablo LED profile spots – powerful, fully-featured, compact 300W units that pack a 19,000 lumen punch - which immediately went out on tour and were initially used on tours by Sam Fender and Asgeir designed by Liam Tully. “We decided on Diablo for similar reasons to its bigger brothers,” says Edwards. “We wanted something we could put into the same rig as Khamsin and Bora to give us a coherent range of fixtures which can cover all sizes and style of venue and show. The big advantage of Diablo is its small size compared to what it is capable of doing: they’ve got an incredible feature set for such a little light and they are very, very bright for such a small fixture – they really do pack a punch! Ayrton has made a product range that is very investable.”

“We are proud that Adlib has entrusted the heavy lifting tasks of lighting their arena and broadcast applications to our Khamsin and Bora,” says Ayrton’s Jerad Garza. “The output and consistency of these fixtures, and that of the smaller Diablo, will continue to give them returns for many shows to come.”