Los Angeles, California-based ADJ Group is a diversified global enterprise that includes five companies: ADJ, Elation Professional Lighting, Acclaim Lighting, American Audio and Global Truss. Collectively, these companies provide lighting, audio and staging products for nightclubs, discos, mobile entertainers, bands, concert tours, theatre productions, TV shows, cruise ships, churches, trade shows, architectural applications and more. Alfred Gonzales is the National Sales Manager for ADJ USA and leads a sales team of over 25 people. He has been with the ADJ Group for over 25 years.
CPM: What trends or challenges is ADJ addressing in the church market?
Gonzales: First of all, churches of all sizes have had to embrace technology to offer streamed worship and recorded video messages so that individuals can take part in worship and listen to Bible teaching safely from their own homes. Good lighting is essential for this, to make sure that leaders and preachers can be seen clearly. Here at ADJ, we’re offering free educational live video streams of our own, which are packed with lighting-related inspiration, tips and ideas. We’ve called this video series ‘Stay Connected’ and we have one planned for Tuesday, April 21 that will focus specifically on lighting for live streaming. This can be accessed from ADJ’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ADJLighting) at 12pm (Pacific) / 3pm (Eastern).
We have also put together a number of lighting packages especially designed for video streaming, to make it easy for church tech teams to know what to buy. More generally, LED has been the big trend in church lighting over the past few years. Technology has advanced rapidly to the point that even large churches can now use LED-powered fixtures exclusively to light their whole stage and sanctuary. This offers a wide variety of benefits that make LED the wise choice for both new build churches and upgrades to the lighting rigs in existing facilities. LEDs require a fraction of the power of traditional incandescent lightbulbs to generate the same amount of light, which makes for serious savings on electric bills. One of the reasons for this is that LEDs generate a lot less heat, which also has the added advantage of keeping stages cooler for worship leaders, musicians and preachers. Finally, LED light-sources last a very long time, which effectively removes the need for lamp replacements. This lessens the burden on tech directors and their volunteers, especially when fixtures are mounted high up and are difficult to reach.
CPM: What products is ADJ focusing on for the remainder of 2020 (and early 2021)?
ADJ Focus Spot 5Z
Gonzales: We unveiled a whole load of new products at the end of last year, which are currently hitting the market. One of the most exciting from a church perspective is our new Focus Spot 5Z, the latest addition to our popular Focus Series of moving head fixtures. It’s a perfect example of how, as a company, ADJ is always listening to our customers and using the feedback we receive to make improvements to our line. We released the Focus Spot 4Z at the beginning of last year and it proved extremely popular with its powerful 200W LED engine and versatile feature set, including six replaceable rotating GOBOs and two rotating prisms alongside motorized zoom and focus. However, a number of our customers who specialize in the House of Worship market said that to make it the ultimate church fixture it needed a frost filter as well as more color options.
Focus Spot 5Z FX
We took this feedback and developed the 5Z which inherits all the features of the previous model but adds two frost filters (heavy and light) as well as an additional color wheel loaded with CTO and CTB filters. It means that not only can this versatile fixture serve as a moving head profile, but it can also be used to illuminate pastors on stage with diffuse color-corrected washes. In addition, we also included UV and pastel color options (alongside the vibrant saturates on the first wheel) and refined the selection of supplied GOBO patterns with options that are ideal for stage texture and breakup patterns.We also have a new range of professional-grade LED-powered ellipsoidal fixtures, which are ideal for stage illumination in mid-to-large-sized sanctuaries. The Encore Profile Pro WW features a 260W warm white light source, while the Encore Profile Pro Color version makes use of a 250W RGBWAL (red, green, blue, white, amber & lime) LED source to offer color mixing from an extremely wide palette. Both versions feature four blade manual framing shutters, manual focus, a B-size GOBO slot and can be used with a variety of lens options offering both fixed and variable beam angles.
CPM: What makes ADJ unique from other manufacturers?
Gonzales: We offer an all-in-one solution for church integrators. Alongside ADJ lighting we also have Global Truss America, Accu-Cable and Avante Audio speakers, providing a true ‘one stop shop’. Within the ADJ range, we have also put a lot of work into developing our line of products so that we have something that will fit the technical requirements and budgets of all sizes of church. For example, as well as the new pro-grade Encore Profile Pro ellipsoidals, we also have the more affordable Encore Profile 1000 warm white and color models for when the budget is tighter.
ADJ Encore Profile Pro Color Ellipsoidal
In the same way, alongside the Focus Spot 5Z, we also have the new Focus Spot 6Z which has a more powerful 300W LED light-source suitable for bigger stages. On the other hand, the Focus series also has a few different lower cost options for smaller churches with very tight budgets – or for use in children’s or youth rooms.On top of this, we also have a different mentality to other manufacturers. We are not about selling boxes, we prefer to sell solutions. This means that I, alongside my team of sales managers and product specialists, work with our dealers and customers to help them find the right combination of products to match both a church’s budget and their creative aspirations.
CPM: What are the main overall areas of focus or innovation for ADJ as a company?
Gonzales: Our product development team is constantly working on new fixtures that utilise the latest technology to deliver the best possible lighting solutions to our customers. However, equally important to us is the reliability of our products. We invest heavily in ETL certification for the majority of our products, which not only gives churches piece of mind but may by a requirement of local building inspectors. We also never make compromises on quality when it comes to selecting the components for our fixtures and we test them extensively to ensure they won’t let churches down. On top of this, we not only run quality control (QC) checks on every unit before it leaves the factory but we also QC every fixture again before it is shipped from our US warehouse. Finally, we have a US-based product support team available by phone or email to help customers with technical problems and arrange prompt warranty repairs in the unlikely event anything does go wrong. It is this combination of innovation, reliability and customer service that is always our focus here at ADJ, and it’s what we believe sets us apart from our competition.
