High End Systems 🇺🇸

📍 Austin, Texas, USA

🏢 Founded 1988

🌍 Automated Touring Fixtures & Consoles

Overview Innovations Products Applications FAQs Resources

Company Overview

High End Systems (now a brand of ETC – Electronic Theatre Controls) is absolute American lighting royalty. In the 1990s and 2000s, their Intellabeam and Studio Color fixtures effectively built the modern concert touring industry. Today, backed by the colossal manufacturing power of ETC, they continue to produce some of the most powerful, highly sought-after automated LED fixtures in the global touring market.

High End is famous for its ‘Sola’ series of LED moving heads. They were one of the very first manufacturers to completely abandon traditional discharge lamps, proving that custom-engineered white LED engines could be brighter, flatter, and more reliable for massive stadium tours.

Beyond fixtures, High End Systems manufactures the legendary Hog 4 lighting console line. The ‘Hog’ ecosystem is deeply beloved by live event buskers and concert programmers for its incredibly fast, aggressive workflow, allowing them to manipulate massive lighting rigs on the fly during live rock shows.

Core Technologies

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The Ultra-Bright White LED Engine

High End Systems pioneered the transition to white-LED-engine moving heads (the Sola series), achieving massive 50,000+ lumen outputs without the extreme heat, degradation, and bulb-replacement costs of traditional HID lamps.

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Hog 4 Operating System

A legendary lighting control OS designed specifically for live concert ‘busking’ (operating lights manually to the music). Its syntax and tactile layout are universally recognized by top-tier touring programmers.

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Patented Lens Defogging

A highly specialized internal system within their flagship fixtures that actively prevents the heavy theatrical haze and fog used at concerts from condensing and sticking to the massive glass lenses, preserving optical clarity.

Featured Solutions

SolaFrame Series

The undisputed workhorse of modern touring. These massive LED automated profiles feature incredibly precise framing shutters, deep CMY color mixing, and near-silent operation for theaters.

TurboRay

A highly unique, retro-styled LED wash fixture. It features a custom radial diffuser face that looks beautiful on camera, producing incredibly fat, classic narrow beams alongside modern pixel-mapped LED tricks.

Hog 4 Consoles

A range of professional lighting desks, from the massive flagship Hog 4-18 (used at massive festivals) to the compact HedgeHog 4, all running the same incredibly fast, touring-grade software.

Ideal Industry Deployments

🏟️ Major Global Concert Tours

🎭 Broadway & West End Theater

📺 High-End Broadcast Television

🎛️ Live Festival ‘Busking’ Control

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the relationship between High End Systems and ETC?

ETC (Electronic Theatre Controls), the absolute titan of theatrical lighting, acquired High End Systems in 2017. This brilliant merger combined ETC’s unmatched theatrical color science and massive customer support network with High End’s legendary automated concert touring technology.

Why is the Hog console so popular for live concerts?

Unlike theatrical shows which are strictly pre-programmed to a script, rock concerts often require the operator to ‘busk’ (improvise) along with the band. The Hog 4 OS is specifically tailored with massive tactile wheels, fast macros, and a logic flow that makes improvising massive looks incredibly fast.

What makes the SolaFrame’s LED engine so special?

Before the SolaFrame, lighting designers believed LEDs could never match the raw punch of a traditional 1200W arc lamp. High End proved them wrong by engineering massive, custom white-LED arrays that offered a perfectly flat field of light that never dimmed or changed color over thousands of hours of use.