Sound Person’s Guide to Lighting

LEDs are everywhere these days; they are no longer used purely as a standby light for your telly. With significant advances in technology over the last 10 years — reducing heat production and offering more colour choices — LEDs are now commonly used in stage lighting.

David Mellor

Let’s suppose that you are a hi-tech manufacturing company. What is it exactly that you do? Well, you manufacture hi-tech products, of course. But why do you do that? You could be making light bulbs. Making ordinary incandescent light bulbs isn’t very interesting, though, and there isn’t a lot of profit in it. So many companies all over the world have mastered this technology that the eventual sale price has been driven down to rock bottom. However, as a hi-tech company you do things differently. You don’t make products that anyone could make, you make products that only you can make. And the way you do that is to position yourself on the cutting edge of research. You scope out new technologies that no-one has been able to commercialise yet, you brainstorm massively to dream up products, which you could make, that use these technologies, and then you start up your production line and marketing machine. Eventually, other companies will jump on the bandwagon and what was once hi-tech will become run-of-the-mill. But in the meantime you will have advanced the cutting edge just that little bit further and your products will still lead the market.

So, take a company like Philips. They are very good at making light bulbs, but they also see the benefits of competing at the sharp end of technology. About 10 years ago they saw potential in LED technology for further development. Not much more than 10 years ago LEDs were weedy little things that were useful to tell you whether your TV was on standby or not, but not much else. To have the imagination 10 years ago to believe that LEDs could eventually take on incandescent and discharge lamps in terms of power and efficiency is amazing, but some unsung hero at Philips did. In 1999, Philips partnered with Agilent Technologies (previously spun off from Hewlett-Packard) and created Lumileds Lighting. OK, it’s not much of a name but, a decade on, their products are very much in demand for a wide variety of applications including, of course, stage lighting. The company is now completely owned by Philips and I have chosen to focus on Lumileds for this article as their Luxeon products are commonly used for stage lighting. There are, of course, a number of competing manufacturers in the high-power LED market and we should expect vigorous jostling for position as this market develops even further.

Origins

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Sound Person’s Guide to Lighting

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