London, UK (December 4, 2020)—Live sound engineer Matthew Russell has used pandemic downtime to invent the Star Spangled Panner and Star Spangled Panner Mini—tools for precisely setting the horizontal pan of speaker cabinets.
“These products have been specifically designed to address the difficulties in achieving the precise real-world realization of the orientation of event fixtures according to a CAD model, such as those generated in ArrayCalc or MappXT,” he told Pro Sound News. “From a sound perspective, which is my background, the purpose [is] to optimize HF coverage of point sources; however, I also see them having applications in the world of LX and AV.”
While it is relatively easy to adjust the vertical tilt of a speaker cabinet to ensure coverage matches that suggested by analysis software, adjusting horizontal pan is often done by eye—so the Panner aims to bring a greater level of precision to that effort.
Designed to work with clamps by Doughty, the Panner is placed between the rigging frame yoke and clamp. The clamp is then used as a fixed reference to determine the pan of an individual fixture or splay of adjacent fixtures.
Produced and sold by Augment The Event Ltd., the Panners are CNC milled out of 6082 T6 Aluminum which are then black anodized and engraved for touring durability. The laser boxes are 3D printed out of matte black PLA.
Russell is a UK-based production sound engineer with 12 years experience in the UK theatre industry, working for a number of theatre producers including ATG Productions, RSC, National Theatre Productions, Fiery Angel, Headlong and Chichester Festival Theatre.
Star Spangled Panner • www.starspangledpanner.co.uk
