I mis-spoke about "
System 70" being one of the things that brought Kliegl down.
It is, however an interesting little story in itself. I am not sure of the exact timeline, but this is what I have been able to find out:
Thorn introduced the
Q-file in about 1973 and Kliegl became the US distributer/agent. Gordon Perlman and Steve Carlson developed Performance for Kliegl which was introduced in 1978. ...
I still recall being part of the (? first?) Kliegl computer installation in the US at Indiana U. Bloomington while in grad school. 1970 IIRC, huge
desk console but only a few sliders. had to enter each
dimmer separately, @
level, record, repeat for every
dimmer. I was never a board op so I'm not sure about exact details. If anyone knows a Joan Sullivan, she was the grad student that became the expert on that board, she could make it work when no one else could. There were a lot of glitches, unexpected blackouts, garbled cues
etc. , that turned out to be several thousand cold solders in discrete components (very few if any IC's then). Kligel knew they had problems, I was the fly on the wall in an elevator ride at the
USITT conf in Boston (?late 80's early 90's ? can't remember) Joel Ruben, Jo Mielziner and a couple other big wigs got on the hotel elevator behind me. During the ride I overheard Meilziner say to Joel, "
Face it Joel, you've got the worst "C" clamp in the business!" and Joel looked back and said "I know!" I could tell be the tone of his voice, he knew the company was in deep s*#@* and he didn't know how to climb out. The long slide started in the late '60's. After I got back from Nam, I was finishing my undergrad work at OCU ( Oklahoma City University) and during my time in service they had built a new
theatre. The new instruments were all Klieg. There were 3", 6" and 8" ellipsoidals, (we called them all "
Leko's" because "
Leko", to us meant
Ellipsoidal Stage Lighting
Instrument.). The Klieg units were among the very first "Quartz light" units, what today we all
call tungsten-Halogen or just
Halogen. The filaments were a single coiled coil. The 3"
Leko's used a double ended lamp, the 6" and 8" (IIRC) used single ended inverted lamps. The early quartz lamp filaments were VERY fragile after the initial
burn in of 2-3 minutes. After that they became very brittle. So moving a
unit after
burn in was a problem. The 3" units were the bane of our existence! To replace a lamp, the housing hinged in the middle and the
reflector split. The back or lamp half hinged open and the back part of the
reflector vaguely resembled a butterfly. If you picture the
reflector as the butterfly's wings, the double ended lamp would be the body. The first problem was that the
reflector was only connected by a couple of points and removing or inserting a lamp was guaranteed to
bend the back part of the
reflector. In addition, as a lamp
filament was not a true
point source of light, various manufacturers had developed flatted and double flatted reflectors to adjust for this issue. Kliegl did not, they went for the manufacturing expediency and $$ saving of using a spun
reflector. The spun
reflector was a truer
ellipsoidal shape, but as
the light source was not a true
point source, the spun
reflector was a poor choice. Anyway, almost every time we had to move an
instrument we would have to put in a new lamp. The 3" units also needed frequent "re-bending " of the
reflector to get a clean beam. Bottom
line, Kliegl was very slow to respond to industry changes and the needs of the personnel using the equipment at a time when rapid change was the norm. And this was all before the explosion of moving lights,
LED sources,
etc.