Masons Sound for Venues supplies and maintains the sound, lighting and video equipment and systems for Gorilla, a 700-capacity multi-purpose live music and entertainment venue in the centre of Manchester.
Gorilla already had an Optoma EH2060 projector to provide visual backdrops for club nights and video playback for film screenings. This projected onto a 4m screen positioned at the back of the stage area, with HDMI and VGA connections running from both the stage and the Engineer's position at the rear of the venue.
Gorilla is a bar, kitchen, stage and club. Set under the railway tracks on Whitworth Street West it hosts comedy, clubnights, theatre and live music. As well as the nightclub, Gorilla has a studio, gin parlour and main bar, which won the prestigious Bar of the Year award at the 2013 Manchester Food and Drink Awards.
Although happy with its existing EH2060 projector, the use of fog during performances blocked the infra red signal and needed an additional infra red repeater to operate the projector.
The previous model also needed a video scaler to provide all video format options at both the stage and Engineer's booth.
Gorilla was delighted with the overall HD image quality, brightness, reliability and functionality of the EH2060 but, with the additional features offered by the EH7700, was happy to consider upgrading to this brighter, higher resolution projector. This had to be equally reliable and able to be installed using the same mountings.