When Paul Duffy and his then partner set up Pacific Sound & Light at Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham, it was with a view to gaining a slice of the impending new millennium celebration business. Fast forward a decade, and his business has diversified from hire into installation, and from concert work to corporate and theatre tours.

It was when Pacific found themselves contracted to provide sound and lighting production on The Drifters theatre tour — where they were expected to turn the venue into an authentic 70s disco environment, using mirrorballs, that they realized their stock of premium grade moving lights didn’t contain the one feature they needed. Paul Duffy explained, "We needed something specific because our existing 250W fixtures didn’t contain an iris, and in certain applications (with raked seating) we were blinding the audience sweeping downstage off the rear truss once they hit the mirrorballs."

Tony Bailey from MilTec visited Pacific last year and showed Paul the unit at the time. Subsequently, MilTec provided demo units for evaluation. "We put them against our other units and they were every bit as powerful — but with the additional motorised zoom and iris it was exactly what we wanted, and MilTec have been great to work with, providing all the back-up."

The XL250 features a 14°-22° motorised zoom and iris as well as seven interchangeable, indexing rotating glass gobos, ten interchangeable static gobos and a three-way rotating prism, with 12 interchangeable colours.

Now that the band is recreating the original ‘70s disco vibe, featuring three 12in mirrorballs which can be brought into play independently or collectively, the six PR Lighting moving heads (accompanied by some LED lighting) provide all the versatility that is needed. "We can focus the heads direct on the footprint of the mirrorball and control the beams exactly where we want them to hit, with no light spillage whatsoever. We can also simply iris down the lighting, put a prism in and get three separate gobo FX and iris chases. It gives us a few more options and we bought these fixtures precisely with that in mind."

According to Paul Duffy, the XL250’s are run off an Avolites Pearl Expert and offer fast movement, excellent colour saturation and output, and are easy to rig. "The XL 250’s also provide a great colour spread when you zoom out — the beam is wider than on our other fixtures and this makes them ideal as conventional washlights for our corporate work."