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Martin Professional Stagebar 54 LED Luminaire
Light emitting diode (LED) fixtures are today an inevitable part of many designs. However, I have not seen a lot of RGB LED units that were 1.) bright enough or 2.) able to function as little more than an effect light to throw some color around. Of late, there are manufacturers who are adding amber or white LEDs to the red, green, and blue LEDs for a better color mix and the diode manufacturers are increasing the brightness at a quick pace. Combining the latest in LED technology with cutting-edge luminaire design, Martin Professional has gotten into the game with its first LED luminaire, the Stagebar 54 LED, which was launched in March 2007. I thought that it was time to take a more in-depth look at this unit.
The color mixing of the LEDs in the Stagebar was one of the first areas that the Martin R&D department focused on. “When we designed this fixture, we put a lot of effort into the color range,” says Morten Kristensen, product manager, Effect Lighting at Martin. “It is one of the reasons why we added the amber and the white LEDs. That is definitely a benefit and something that has been well-received from the market. We also worked to create absolute color in terms of our color calibration. We have four different modes to control color. Three of the modes use what we call color calibration, so each unit is calibrated from the factory. Meaning that in those three modes, you will always achieve the same color. We have a very narrow selection of the different LEDs, but we also do a color calibration with our own software. Each LED is measured and those values are stored inside of the unit. So when running them in these three modes, you will achieve uniform colors within the individual unit, but also between multiple units.”
A Focused Inspection
The three color-calibrated modes in the Stagebar 54 are HSI (Hue, Saturation, Intensity), which is a more intuitive method of mixing colors. You set the color you want by scrolling through hues (red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet), altering their saturation from deep to white, and finally changing their intensity from bright to dark; HSI-C (HSI with Color Temperature), which adds color temperature control to HSI; and RGB, which uses only three channels to approximate a standard RGB output based on all five colors. The last mode is RGBAW (Red, Green, Blue, Amber, White), which uses five channels to control each color independently. In this mode there is no color calibration. In all the modes, I found the units very bright and the colors mixed smoothly.
Many people mistakenly think that there is no heat involved in an LED fixture, but there is, and this is where many manufacturers miss the mark and shorten the life of the LED. The engineers at Martin spent time on the heat management as well as staying within the specification of the Luxeon K2 LEDs. “We run them within specification,” comments Kristensen. “That is a way that we can assure that we live up to an acceptable lifetime. We also put a lot of focus on the die temperature. When we promise 30,000 hours; you can believe that it is 30,000 hours. We don’t go out and promise 100,000 hours, because we know that is an unrealistic promise.” Martin has built in temperature monitoring as well as on-demand fans to regulate cooling. There are two modes for the fans; one where the fans run constantly at full speed and there is a fan-regulation mode where, depending on the ambient temperature, the fans will increase or decrease in velocity. I didn’t find the fans to be too noisy for most applications, including church services.
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Michael S. Eddy writes about design and technology. He can be reached at mseddy2900@hotmail.com. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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