DC stages: Is it time for AC to exit the stage?

Imagine you walk into a venue to set up for a show, and you look for the normal 400-amp 3-phase company switch to power your lighting rig. Instead of finding the normal grey metal box with five Camlock connectors on the bottom, you see one that looks a bit different. It’s slightly larger than you would expect, and it has four Camlocks instead of five. The sign on it says, “DC Voltage.” Welcome back to the world of DC power distribution.

Almost every device we plug in on stage today, such as consoles, LED lighting fixtures, video walls, digital amplifiers, and media servers, have a switch-mode power supply whose purpose is to convert the incoming AC to DC, and with every conversion, energy is lost due to inefficiency.

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