Altronic Distributors are no strangers to the Public Address market. SILICON CHIP has reviewed several of their amplifiers and peripherals over the years, including at least two of their portable PA amplifiers.

We’ve always found the Altronics equipment, sold under several "house" brands, to be extremely well made and, more importantly, to have performed very well under "real world" conditions.

They are widely found in professional installations and have a good name in the trade.

We’ve set up some of the Altronics gear at major sporting events and it has out-performed some significantly more expensive products.

For example, I’ve had to run PA amplifiers from small generators on occasions and where a couple of well-known Japanese amplifiers didn’t like the less-than-perfect supply one bit (popped fuses were the order of the day), the "Redback" (Altronics) amplifier just kept going and going!

Portable PAs

Not long ago, Altronics’ General Manager Brian Sorensen rang to say they had just received the first shipment of a brand new range of Portable PA Amplifiers – and he’d like us to have a look at them.

I have to confess at first I was of the "ho-hum, seen one, seen ’em all" mindset. But then Brian told me that, as far as he knew, these were unique in Australia because they had the option of being set up to cover a large area completely without wires.

With a plug-in option, one box could transmit its program to the next box, which could receive and re-transmit on yet a different frequency to the next box and so on. And with battery operation (as well as mains) that meant you could take a few of these to a venue, turn them on and be instantly "on the air".

At left is one of the new Okayo portable PAs from Altronics (all models look the same from the front!) while at right is a fully-tricked-up model with two wireless mic receivers (top), CD/MP3 player (next down) wireless link module (2nd from bottom) and the common input/output/control unit (bottom). The units are designed to mate with Altronics heavy-duty tripods (C0521A) which fit into a "top hat" mount in the base of the box.