Adamson win Sydney shootout

Adamson’s S10 line array has won a shoot-out against three of the world’s leading brands, and will now enter the stock of leading Australian AV firm Scene Change. The multi-award winning, high-end event company were won over by the S10’s superior tonality, clarity, rigging, and ease of configuration. They join audio company Eighth Day Sound, Hillsong Church, Haycom and Perth’s DC Productions as major Australian adopters of Adamson.

The shoot-out was conducted in Bay 17 of Sydney’s Carriageworks, a regular workplace for Scene Change and a challenging acoustic environment. Each PA was represented by its Australian distributor, with technical experts on-hand to show Scene Change staff how to prep, configure, rig and tune their systems. Adamson were represented by their APAC Sales Manager James Ritter and distributor CMI’s Pro Audio Sales Manager Garry Farmer, with Eighth Day Sound’s Simon Farrell bringing in and setting up the S10 rig. Hillsong Church’s Audio and Infrastructure Director Ricki Cook was also in attendance, allowing Scene Change to ask questions of an existing and impartial Adamson customer.

“I was keen to hear Adamson compared to the other systems,” said Ricki. “While I consider Adamson the underdog against three of the world’s leading brands , I have to say it ate the other PAs alive. After critical listening, the Scene Change staff asked me questions about Hillsong’s history with Adamson, why we chose it, and why it always won our shootouts. I told them all the reasons, including all the tiny details we can hear in the PA compared to its competitors. And the pattern control is second to none – it can control low end like nothing else and the HF is like a laser beam.”

“The shootout process was a critical component of our purchasing decision,” said John Dinh, Director at Scene Change. “Being able to have all four of the PA options we were looking at in the same room at the same time was amazing. I wanted my staff to set up each of the PAs with their representatives so that they could experience the rigging, cabling, tuning and tweaking of each of the systems. We thank the other brands for allowing us to listen to and play with their systems.”

In assessing the contenders, Scene Change had done rigorous comparisons and preparation before the shootout. On the day, they focussed on four major characteristics of each system. “For us, it was rigging, weight, tonal quality and coverage, and ease of system configuration,” explained John. “The Adamson system is simple, clear and so, so easy; plot the system in Adamson’s Blueprint software, take your angles, preset pins on the boxes, and then fly the thing out. So simple! And wow, that low-mid and bottom end! It’s a nicely balanced tone that holds together very well at extreme volumes – it’s very pleasant on the ears. And the HF directivity is absolutely phenomenal. Dante connectivity straight in to Lake processing on the Lab.gruppen amps is another great thing for us, as we can mount the amps in our Yamaha CL mixing consoles and patch straight from there.”

Subsequently, Scene Change have purchased 16 elements of S10 augmented by eight S119 subwoofers. With their Sydney office committing to being part of the Adamson family, Scene Change have another five locations Australia wide, and CMI look forward to introducing the Adamson S10 system to them in the future”. “Our whole approach to equipment is to give our staff the right tools to deliver the best result possible for our clients,” John concluded. “We work with a lot of technical producers who push the boundaries of production and they have started moving in to larger spaces where point-source boxes are no longer the right tool for the job. To be able to get the required coverage in many of these spaces we were flying a lot of boxes. With the S10 system we can now reduce the number of hangs but achieve the same coverage. We’ll be deploying our S10s on a lot of our conferences, artistic programmes, theatre, and musical events.”