Audio-visual specialist Wise Productions is celebrating its 25th anniversary this summer, of which 17 years have been spent in NEXO’s company, taking PS Series cabinets to the smartest parties and events in London’s most fashionable venues.
David Wise bought his first NEXO loudspeaker in 2000 – eight compact high-output PS8s for the Christmas events at London’s Science Museum. “I still have those cabinets,” he reveals. Soon after, Wise Productions added PS10s to inventory. “We liked the great sound we got from such small boxes, and that the PS design fitted in with our key objective of achieving super low visibility for technical equipment.”
As Wise Productions expanded, gaining Preferred Supplier status to more and more of London’s top-flight museums, galleries and venues, there came a game-changing moment. “In 2009, we had a big event in the Great Court of The British Museum,” recalls David Wise. “It was then, and is now, one of the most demanding environments we work in, so we brought in NEXO’s GEO S1230 line array modules and set up pairs of them on tripods. It was the first time we were venue-specific with audio equipment, and the results were so good that the relationship with NEXO changed – that was when we recognised that we were going to be a NEXO house.”
Soon, the Wise Productions audio engineers were looking at the elegant compact modules of the new GEO M6 line array. “Our clients were asking for a bigger sound, but it took a bit of time to persuade them that cabinets as small as the M620 would deliver what they wanted. Until they actually listened to them.” Now the versatile M6 modules are a much-used part of the Wise inventory, used as single units, pole-mounted pairs, and arrayed lines.
Working with 35 venues in the UK, Wise Productions has 20 full-time staff delivering lighting, video, projection and staging services as well as audio. The ‘Wise Guys’ have some simple operating procedures, mixing military precision with a sense of fun and a sense of occasion, and taking great care to make it all look amazing. “We always work to incredibly tight get-in and get-out schedules,” says David Wise. “We design our flightcases specifically to speed the load-in, we even cut our cables to exactly the right length so that it looks good as fast as possible.”
And this mindset has led the Wise team to NEXO’s ID Series of high-output über-compact point source boxes, which are now the favoured loudspeakers for speech presentations. “No tripods, we don’t fly – there’s no time. We put them on a base and stick and they are ideal for museums, galleries, dinners with speeches. And they look absolutely elegant.”
Housed in Wise’s custom-made flightcases, complete with a variety of mounting options, the ID24 cabinets are speedily delivered to location. The combination of high SPL output with variable directivites makes it a go-to loudspeaker for the wide variety of events in Wise Production’s diary.
www.wiseproductions.co.uk
All photos, © Wise Productions.
